In The Cage Of The Bear's Claws
by Mr. Bluu
Summary: Dmitri returns home, carrying betrayal and the fruits of his labor in two green tanks. Multichapter.
1. Pribytiye

Moscow was colder than Dmitri Papov remembered.

Baltimore's unique, wind-and-rain brand of freezing had deadened his nerves and his skin to devastating effect. General Winter would no doubt be unkind to him. That old ally already skimmed the ground and draped the air in snow. He sat on a bench on a suburban street corner, two sea green tanks big enough for two men to fit inside next to him. Dmitri's disguise that he'd worn to meetings with his spymasters was criminally underprepared to keep out the freezing wind. It was December. Where the hell were they?!

He breathed visibly in the chill air and gnashed his teeth. The commissars traveled at the pace of old dogs. Dmitri glances down at the two tanks, worry in his expressive eyebrows. It was just like them to demand marksman's punctuality out of their agents and not bother to show up on time themselves. Whether they kept him waiting on a concrete block in the rain or a bench in the wind, the process was the same. Dmitri bit back more _colorful_ thoughts. The KGB officials paid him and agents like him well, _if_ they survived. That was more than he could say for many of his countrymen. Sounds emanate from the tank to his right. They were like a beast's, as if the containers held angry whales thrashing and yearning for freedom. He checks his watch again, bedeviled. Where the hell were they?!

Frost has crept into the crevices of the teal metal tanks, which for all their technological grandeur can't do battle with mother nature forever. The see-through ports on the tops had begun to film over, the warmth of their contents and the sub-zero oblivion of Russian winter stalmating on the glass. Baltimore hadn't been cold enough. The package's temperature resistance hadn't ever been properly tested, Dmitri remembers. He bites his nails. If its place of origin is taken into account, it shouldn't be able to last more than a half day out here, tank or no. His wasted years in enemy territory, _capitalist_ territory, away from family and friends with not even his identity to keep him together, would be wasted if they _did not get here right now_.

Where the hell were they?!

Like a flight of valkyries out of the beyond, they come.

Black cars, five in number, come around the corner in autonomous fashion. The vehicle in the back is larger, with an equally midnight painted trailer tailing it. Dmitri sighs in relief, his shivers momentarily forgotten in the heat of success. Be it by American or Soviet hands, the entities within these tanks will remain alive. A memory flashes in his mind. _I don't want an intricate, beautiful thing destroyed!_ A smirk colder than corpses. Green, oddly scented candy, no doubt produced by proletariat workers slaving away in American factories.

It fades as the last vehicle stops next to him. Clanks from inside the trailer reach Dmitri's ear, and a rough voice barks commands in Russian. The door opens from the top down.

Five Red Army infantrymen, fur coats tight around their bodies and gloved fingers snug on the triggers of their PPSh-41 submachine guns, erupt from the trailer. They cordon the road. Eyes piercing from underneath their shapkas, they beckon Dmitri into the compartment, and two of them haul the mighty green sarcophagi in after him. Dmitri catches a glimpse of their rifles as he is filed into darkness, and suddenly he smells blood and hears cries for mercy in German. The soldiers follow him into the unlit trailer, and close the doors behind him. The car begins to move. Darkness continues to hush the space, and Dmitri ponders his situation. He'd brought them what they wanted, made his country proud, hadn't he? The ride he's on now has all the earmarks of ending with his brains blown all over a snowy Moscow alleyway. Did Mihalkov relay some order from the premier he had forgotten to carry out?

The light snaps on, flickering slightly. As if Lenin himself had ordained it, there he was.

"Ah, Dmitri!" Mihalkov exclaimed in Russian. He clapped his hands together. Behind the old man, his burly accomplice, Arkady, stood resolute. "How was your trip? I am sorry I could not arrange for a few grunts to help you drag these from the airstrip." He taps a hand upon one of the tanks. Unlike its companion, still trembling and noisy, this one is still. Dmitri looks around. His mouth hangs open and his brow contorts in defeat. Eyes beneath glasses trace each of the soldiers around them. They are silent, indefatigable in their impersonations of statues. If Dmitri's expression of _you're kidding_ amused them, they didn't show it. Dmitri's hat is off now, and the heavyset man runs a hand through his stress-ravaged hair.

"Is this the same remorse I was showed when you were too busy taking pleasure in American dining to listen to me?" Dmitri says, and the syllables are strained, the anger inside him too big to sound natural coming from his small mouth.

Mihalkov dodges the question. He brings Dmitri close to him with one arm, too friendly for the other man's comfort. "How is it to be back home? Does the Motherland still drop your jaw with her splendor?"

"It is cold."

Mihalkov smiles and sets his jaw, in the same wholly hostile way that Dmitri remembers Strickland did. Dmitri does the same, more out of quiet rage than whatever hidden things his comrade's heart holds. The car lurches, and he falls upon one of the tanks. His body curves around the cylindrical glass of it, and Dmitri's vision is enveloped by green waters.

Mihalkov pats him on the back and hoists him back up. "We are descending, comrade! You are not behind enemy lines anymore. No need to shield your projects." Dmitri brushes his hand away, and when he feels his feet slip a fraction of an inch towards the front of the trailer and the blood in his head flow ever so slightly to his right ear, he knows Mihalkov is right. They must be going through some kind of service tunnel. Underground, definitely. The drop in temperature can only be from the concrete boxing them in. Where are they? It cannot be a nuclear bunker. Hostilities of that rapturous magnitude couldn't have started yet. Even had they, why bring _him_? Dmitri was an asset, a tool to the commissars the same as a hammer or sickle was a tool of the worker. He was unimportant. That conclusion also answered question two in his head. They also cannot be in some kind of classified Party meeting. There was no sound reason for Dmitri to attend such a meeting, any more than it would have been for Strickland or Fleming to be privy to the whims or bureaus of their own John F. Kennedy.

Dmitri also does not feel as though he is no longer behind _enemy lines_.

The downward angle of the vehicle realigns and becomes horizontal again. After a few minutes of mental cursing and goblin glances at Mihalkov behind his back, the engine dies and Dmitri feels the car slow and stop. Clanking, the doors open and the soldiers march out like centurions of old. Dmitri, by comparison, shuffles like Frankenstein's Monster, turquoise tanks in tow.

The room that delivers him from the Twilight Zone of the car trailer is . . . familiar. He had witnessed its likeness far away, in a rain driven grey forest full of broken people. Clearly, the lab layout notes he had provided to Mihalkov had laid their roots deep and omnipotent in Moscow. It was nearly the same as OCCAM's T - 4 laboratory where Dmitri had learned so much. The tunnel they had been driven through is denied to them by a heavy, mechanized door, no doubt to keep out the cold. Humming of heating fans, rumbling above Dmitri's thin-haired head, confirm his suspicions. Instead of a smaller, treated - water pen in the right corner of the room, a larger one, nearly twice the size of the American model, occupied the center. Greenish chemical supplement littered the surface of the water like chops of garlic. Collared chains hung from the ceiling and the upright, glassed tank he had seen in Baltimore had been doubled. One lay at each end of the room, pedestals at their bases bearing the Soviet hammer and sickle. Other socialist paraphernalia dashed the walls in odd places, posters similar to those Dmitri had seen in OCCAM's women's locker room. When he'd confronted the cleaners.

"Our technicians bore some ripe fruit from your work, Dmitri," Mihalkov says. He gestures an aged hand to the display before them. "You are lucky that Arkady and I were delayed in leaving the States. To hear that there would be two of them . . . doubling a feat of engineering like this takes time, comrade."

"Imagine all of the knowledge we have denied the Americans!" Another door, to what Dmitri assumed was the rest of the buried facility, opened. In walked the youthful and pudgy Chairman of the KGB, Vladimir Semichastny. The younger man beamed as he walked in, medals and stripes aglow like stars on his uniform.

"Chairman!" Mihalkov exclaimed, rushing towards Semichastny and clasping his hand. The two shake, and Semichastny offers his hand to Dmitri. He gives the Chairman a firm squeeze, curt and relaxed in the face.

"You ought to lighten up, Papov!" He said, waving a hand to the two tanks and the spectacle of science that was the room. "This was the greatest act of espionage in the history of the Union! The most secretive of American research, the most unassuming of hamlet towns. Stolen from right under their bourgeois noses and all by one man! I wouldn't be shocked if Khrushchev paid us a visit and pinned every medal he had on you! All of this, because of you." Semichastny saluted him in usual Soviet fashion. Dmitri didn't return it and preferred to smile a skin-deep smile at the Chairman.

Semichastny tapped him lightly on his cushioned ribs with his elbow. "You know," the hammer and sickle spangled man said. "We do have a bar the next floor up. They may have birthed the logistics of this place, Dmitri, but the Americans lack one thing we have : _class_. Come, drink, drink and forget the frightful days away from home!"

Was he serious? Dmitri had drunk the entire voyage from Baltimore to Leningrad. And, in the long train ride from Leningrad to Moscow, Dmitri had drunk still. He'd figured that he would do something stupid in the next few days to warrant his death, most likely from the smoking end of a Makarov. The package was his concern, and the moral directive to safeguard it was coming into conflict with his instinct to remain alive. With a wet breath of vodka in his mouth, the knife of his troubles was blunted into a spoon.

But, another concern plays in Dmitri's head, and it pilots him like a puppeteer. His head shakes no, that same smile he did not feel on the inside plastered on his face.

"I am a man of science, Chairman Semichastny. I'll forget those frightful days most easily with tools in my hands."

"Suit yourself," comes Semichastny's reply. "Come, comrades! I think I hear The Dark Eyes up the stairs!"

The Chairman, Mihalkov, Arkady, and the five soldiers file out of the room. To Semichastny's credit, The Dark Eyes is in fact wafting into the hall outside from above them. Dmitri hated the song.

As the laboratory door shuts, Dmitri strides to the sea-green tanks. They are side by side, like industrial rollers the color of American Cadillacs. He rotates them on the wheeled trolleys they'd come to the Soviet Union in, until the glass portion once again faces him.

He taps both tanks on the glass, three times, gently.

The package - _packages_ \- surface like Lovecraft's own Star-Spawn from the murky liquid.

In one tank, Elisa Esposito, signing what Dmitri guesses to be expletives at him while her gills flutter in rage.

In the other, the scaly Hercules that is the Asset, hissing and flaring every spine and fin on his body as the Russian looks upon him.

They both glare at him, silently irate, fuming, seething.

Dmitri wonders what he's changed by going home.


	2. Vremya Reka

_(_ For those who care, what follows is an AU of the time right before the Asset's release in the Shape of Water. The initial change is when Strickland pieces it together himself where the creature is being kept instead of torturing it out of Dmitri. This, precisely, details how Dmitri ends up home with our lovers in tow. -Mr. Bluu)

 _Strickland looks out upon the rows of computers below his office. He's still, deathly still. The buffeting business below him, men at their computers, officials on the phone, Hoffstetler scribbling on a notepad as he and Fleming shared words Strickland couldn't hear ; all of that is lost on him as he gazes upon it. It doesn't reach him. His body is as unmoving as an effigy._

 _All of his motion is in his mind. Thoughts and suppositions run and spring around in his brain, dodging, ducking, flipping, sprinting. Like the wise of a warzone. He thinks and chews, sea-colored candies splintering under the jackhammer of his teeth. The move occupies his mouth, sets a rhythm for him. Strickland worked with rhythm well ; at the moment, the rhythm of inhuman screeches and crackles of electricity is not one he can make out. The motions in his head run, spring, dodge, duck, and sprint towards the answer. How can he bring that back? How can he hear the beat again? Where is the Asset? And who has taken that old fiendish friend from him?_

 _The investigation has stagnated. Reel upon reel of film from security cameras had been laid upon the floor, all of sensitive areas ; the loading docks, each inch of hallway between them and the T - 4 laboratory. Strickland and Fleming had laid on their knees for hours, long after the sun had come up and OCCAM emptied for the day. It was cruelly, cosmically convenient that T - 4 had no cameras itself. General Hoyt had ordered that no footage of the Asset be created, lest the Reds clue in to its location. No need to provoke them into beginning a hunt for it. That, and the engineers had been overly paranoid about the possibility of the recorders being damaged by water. Strickland hated engineers like he hated scientists. All snivel and pragmatism. No muscle. The footage had come up empty, only grey stone and empty lots. The candy and the pills had grained as one then, crushed into sand together, vigorously, angrily._

 _He wracked his brain as he watched that ash and teal world move below him. What had been the model on the laundrovan? The darkness of the facility had hidden everything of value from him! The license plate, the address or name of the company the driver had "worked" for ; even more than a second's worth of view of his outline against the streetlights._

 _Strickland felt his teeth clench together like the hammer of a firearm. The salivated remnants of the candy mold between them, clayish, flavorless._

 _Where was it?_

 _Now all rhythm is gone. Strickland lungs fill with urgency and need bubbles in the space within him where a soul would be. It needed to return. He needed it ; needed to grind it under his heel, make it recoil at his slightest twitch._

 _Suddenly, Strickland's eyes catch something as he glances disinterested over the people below. Some opaque, reserved smell or gem that he longed to breath in. The cleaners, Esposito and Fuller, walk into the room, beelining for Hoffstetler with no carts to slow them down. He waves Fleming off and listens to them with that pursed look that Strickland saw often gracing his face. Fuller says something into his ear and hands him a plastic bag. He turns to Esposito, his face alight now. With what emotion, Strickland couldn't tell. She signs, slowly and with trembling hands. Her small, dark eyes are scarlet at the lids, and moist. Hoffstetler says something, and she breaks, holding her head in her hands and sobbing into Fuller's shoulder. Hoffstetler turns back to stone, and grips the mute's shoulder. His prominent eyebrows, so betraying of the notions in his heart, are furrowed. Determined. Strickland watches her return from her grief, looking at Hoffstetler again as he says something to her . She nods, and for one second, one brief and deathless and eternal moment, Strickland meets her gaze across that hurried space._

 _He remembers that look._

 _When he'd seen her on the stairs to his office, invisible as she scrubbed the bannister, after he had broken the Asset, she'd had that look. He'd known she was there. He could smell her presence easier than napalm or gun oil or saltwater. With eagle's senses he had felt her in that room as Hoyt droned on. The egg also had been a telltale traitor to her being there._

 _He knew where the Asset was._

* * *

" _Dr. Hoffstetler!" Dmitri turned on his heels at the sound of his adopted name. The cleaners walked into the room, walking against the tide of the men and women at work there. He acts as if he does not know them. Fleming stands behind him. The other man stutters and nearly drops his clipboard, neurotic as ever. Dmitri rolls his intense eyes and mouths_ go _to the former security officer. Fleming is a paper man and relents easily. "Dr.?" a voice behind him says, and he turns back to the colored woman, Zelda. She leans in and whispers in his ear._

" _We need to talk about our . . . friend," she says._

" _What about him?" Dmitri replies._

 _She hands him a bag. Clinging to the airless plastic film are three dark green polygons. They are nearly translucent and blood darkens sections of them. Dmitri's heart sinks. The pryings of OCCAM's scientists had revealed dark things. The creature, if kept out of water for prolonged periods, such as Strickland's torture sessions, would die ; but if periodically resubmerged and brought back out again, death would come far slower. His hide would peel and dry. Lungs that breathed air, that were never meant to sustain him for more than a day, would become overtaxed. The copious amounts of air were an environmental pollutant, Dmitri theorized, and pulmonary fibrosis would set in. Logically death followed. The scales already showed signs of degradation ; they looked like membranes, see-through. They were thinner, unpuffed with the quantity of water he needed. The revelation burns in his head as he looks at Elisa, the mute._

We don't know what's wrong with him _, she signs._ He coughed up blood into the water I keep him in.

" _How long has he been like this?" The doctor asks. The blood in the water was ominous._

 _Fibrosis must have set in early, against his predictions._

 _Something he'd said must have offended her, because she sniffled loudly and started to sob, noiselessly as always, and buried her face into her friend's chest._

 _Dmitri didn't know how to react to this. Why did she not just tell him? If he knew how long the symptoms had endured he could gauge how long they had to come up with a feasible escape plan. On the fly decisions would risk his cover, or worse, the lives of the cleaners or the creature. His own wasn't an issue. He was a KGB agent. His life was forfeit when he joined._

 _The eloping couldn't wait anyway. Tonight Dmitri would be taken home. How far or close the creature was to death was irrelevant. With Dmitri Papov back home in the Soviet Union, it was dead already._

 _He hardens his face, touching Elisa's shoulder gently but firmly. She looks back at him and wipes her face. Strength returns to her face, although it shares the couch of her heart with sorrow. Dmitri suspects they are familiar friends._

" _Ms. Esposito? We must release him tomorrow."_

 _Her eyes shift from him, upwards, behind his back, towards the office that overlooked the entire bustling room. Dmitri doesn't need to follow her gaze to feel the corpse-stare of Strickland on his body for a moment. It settles somewhere near him, and Elisa looks transfixed, muted horror on her grief-lined face._

 _Like she's just seen the Grim Reaper. Like Norman Bates had just pulled back the shower curtain._

* * *

 _Strickland rises from bed, naked, Elaine's nude body tentacled by white sheets. He dresses slowly, like a dictator. Sighing with relief, the pants of his suit slide up his waist. He despises sex with Elaine. At first it had been a fight, a horse race, a competition. He challenged himself to that ever elusive goal of victory over all things. He pulls on his undershirt and the leather bindings of the gun holster. He strived. How tight could he twist her breast? How fast could he piston himself inside and outside her? How swiftly could he bring her to orgasm? But now it was empty. He'd reached those limits, found the answers to all of those questions. He pulls on the black coat, silver revolver cold against his rib, and cattle prod in hand. There was no satisfaction in her now. It was all or nothing, and Strickland had proved himself her better completely._

 _But there were two who still sought to challenge him, to displace the ultimate superiority that Strickland reveled in and replace it with a grey chalice that holds the poison of defeat._

 _Strickland walks outside, into the rain._

 _He gets into his Cadillac, going to destroy them all._

* * *

 _Dmitri paces._

 _His apartment is packed, ready, and save for the suitcase it looks as if he had never been there. Duty calls. Moscow calls. He hoists the suitcase, fedora on his balding head, and grips the doorknob. Dmitri is ready, prepared to close the door on his apartment and his false life ; prepared to close the door on Bob Hoffstetler for good._

 _He stops, halfway out the door. Dmitri feels the presence and the hate and the gaping Garmr void, feels it like sugary breath down his neck, even across the ashen plain of Baltimore ; Strickland knew of Elisa's plans. The look she had had in OCCAM yesterday . . . he could practically smell the glance she had shared with Strickland. Elisa wore her heart's every motive and want on her face ; they were discovered. Dmitri almost chuckled at the thought, Strickland so ready to pounce like the tiger he was, even though the location and the niceties of men kept him from doing so. The urgency of the situation likewise keeps Dmitri from chuckling._

 _What light does spill from the hidden heavens, and makes it through the driving rain, is yellow, aged. The sun is in its death throes. Evening. It is almost time._

 _The suitcase meets the floor in the open doorway._

 _The phone meets Dmitri's hand and his fingers meet the dials._

"Hello?" _A voice over the line asks. It is smooth, deep and father-like. The artist. Dmitri fumbles with a name, having met the man only in passage,_ and _after murdering an innocent._

" _Mr. Parker?" He says, tentatively._

"Oh dear . . . I think you may have the wrong number -" _Dmitri hears a smack from the other man, flesh on flesh. "_ My bad, you're . . . Hoffstetler, right? Elisa's told me a lot about you-" _:_

" _Yes, yes that is me," he bowls over the other man's question. "There is no time. Tell Ms. Esposito that she needs to get 'our friend' prepared to move -"_

 _A crash and a boom outside the window, and the apartment is dark. The sunlight is gone, and the clouds have rolled in thick and fat. The only illumination comes from the hall light of the apartment complex. All he hears is the banging of Strickland's prod on the tile of T - 4. It reminds Dmitri of the direness they are in, and he remembers himself, taking the phone up again. Even if the man hadn't caught on and wasn't in rabid pursuit of them, someone else would be. Dmitri had learned one thing as an asset of the KGB : one should never act as if one is safe. There is always another trump card, another ace in the hole that the enemy will employ._

" _Now!" He roars, then darts out of the apartment for the last time._

* * *

 _Giles hears the phone ringing, out in the hallway. The sound is distant, almost unable to reach his ears as he looks upon the dreadful, inevitable spectacle before him._

 _Elisa is stretched out in the tub, shoes and dress and heavy red woolen coat all on and all sopping. She is so dreadfully small looking. Grief has shrunk her, a washing machine on her body. Her eyes, as they have been for so many days, are glassy and pink. Her face shines as she mourns her dying lover, struck like Achilles._

 _She lies atop_ him.

 _He wheezes like an infected tide. His massive eyes open and shut slowly. The lids are creaking gates over them, and when open they are unfocused. Though submerged, his gills look worn beneath the water and flutter weakly. All over his marine, fresco-like body is raw flesh. Scales in these spots are brittle. The damage is more severe on the front of his body. The tip of his nose and a patch of his beautiful forehead are angry and irritated. Chitinous plates on his pectorals and all down his torso suffer the same. The ambitious markings that once denoted his divinity are muted now. The golds are yellowing, and rich teal has become the color of the sky. The green has darkened and lost some of its shimmer._

 _All the same, the creature keeps an aqueous, webbed hand firmly around Elisa's torso, holding her to him. His eyes, though hazy in his unhealthiness, are always pointed in her direction. She is his focus. The creature slips further towards the end and all he wants is her. Giles would have smiled, had it not been so terribly cruel._

" _Can I get you anything?" He asks, weakly and quietly. Elisa acknowledges his presence then, and smiles wryly. It doesn't reach her eyes._

Not unless you can turn back time.

 _The phone continues to ring out in the hall, and the unfelt smile fades. She signs dejectedly._

You should probably answer that.

" _Right," he says, taking the hint. Whether it be death or the ocean that took him, the creature who Elisa loved so much would be gone soon. Giles would persist along with her. She wanted as much time as she could fit into the next few hours with him. So did he._

 _He leaves the bathroom, treading out of Elisa's apartment and into the hall of the Orpheum's loft apartments. The phone buzzes and buzzes until he grips it, and it's silent and willing. He lifts it to his ear._

" _Hello?" Giles wonders who it is. It couldn't be Zelda. She was in his apartment, too modest to intrude on the last shines of Elisa and her creature, but too stubborn to return home and not be there for her friend. Who else would call?_

"Mr. Parker?" _The cautious caller asks. Giles rolls his eyes. Couldn't people put a little more effort into remembering phone numbers?_

" _Oh, dear . . . I think you may have the wrong number - " It hits him like thunder. His assumed identity, the MP who'd almost shot him when the ruse had been discovered, and the scientist who'd killed him. Giles remembered his voice, the haste in it, and the conviction. He thumps himself on the forehead for his stupidity. "My bad, you're . . . Hoffstetler, right? Elisa's told me a lot about you - "_

 _No time for pleasantries, Hoffstetler interrupts him. "_ Yes, yes that is me. There is no time. Tell Ms. Esposito that she needs to get 'our friend' prepared to move -"

 _Thunder crashes in the receiver, and in the sky. Giles heard it through the rundown roof, as well as the telltale paddling of rain on the large window in his apartment. Hoffstetler's voice returns, commanding. "Now!" And the line went dead as he hung up._

 _Giles didn't need to be told twice. He jogs down the hallway, bursts through his door, and Zelda points to the rain in the streets. "Hooh, our boy's gonna be right as rain with this kinda storm. You seein' this? They're as long as my pinkie finger!"_

" _Definitely," he replies, hurriedly. "Get whatever gear you need on and let's go. It's time." A sorrowful look crosses her face._

" _It just ain't fair, Giles."_

 _He agrees, but he can't slow down to voice it._

 _Colored woman and white man, bundled in protection against the might of the storm, approach Elisa's bathtub. The creature croaks weakly, trying to sign, and they can see the faint glow of blue under his faded skin. He's happy to see them. Elisa looks up at them. Her silent lips are trembling._

" _It's time," Giles tells her._

* * *

 _Drenched like a corpse buried at sea, Strickland hunts through the apartment. The tiger that so often is chained under his skin is out now, roaring, teeth bared. He swipes his hand across the mute's counter. Pots and pans crash to the floor amid Strickland's growl of "where the fuck are you?!" Its presence was everywhere. The aura of the Asset coated the place. It frothed the tub, still green with chemical supplement. He tasted its salty breath on his tongue. The thing had hid here, safe, guarded. Where was it?!_

 _He finds the answer in a calendar on the wall, pinned there against the watery, Hollywood surface of the wallpaper. It tears from the old wood, and it lights up his face likes he's looking into the Ark of the Covenant. Strickland stares into the red letters, dumbfounded._

Rain/Docks.

* * *

 _The concrete never ends as Elisa, Giles, and Zelda heave the stumbling creature across it. The rain drives into them, like tiny traffic. All four of them stand at the fateful rim of the canal, and the humans take their last few looks at the amphibian demigod who changed them so completely._

 _Giles takes off his fedora, looking him right in his dinner plate eyes. The old man grips his webbed fingers, squeezing them tight, and places them on his new hair. One more dose couldn't hurt. The creature perks up at this, trilling happily and_ patting _three times on Giles' scalp. His stubbly face smiles sadly, and he too runs his hands down the chafed scales and the strong jawline of Elisa's creature. Giles studies the angles, imprints the shadows in the folds of his brain. Painting would be his solace after this loss. He could feel it._

 _His smile turns happier as he and the creature share affection and gazes. He couldn't have asked for a better subject._

" _You are good," Giles tells him. He turns away, back to the van._

 _Zelda faces the creature, unsure of what to do. She hadn't shared the same unknowable, secret moments that Elisa and Giles had with him. She'd been far removed from the creature's story. His soul was alien to her where it was welcome with the other two. Then she thinks of them. Of Giles, waiting in the rain for them to say goodbye. Of Elisa, her spirit bleeding, her suffering immutable. She had been part of_ their _story. So had the mythical thing she stood before._

 _Zelda supposes that they hold enough in common that way._

 _She clasps a smooth, cold hand in both of hers. Gold meets black in the space, and she looks at him, sublime and content and smiling. "You take care now, y'hear?" she says to him, nudging him with her elbow. The creature presses in closer, holding his irritated forehead against Zelda's and croaking. She feels the wetness from the swiping rain on his skin, sees a flash of blue, and swears that visions of the sea dance in her skull, right where she meets the creature._

 _It is a parting parcel, as she follows Giles back to the van._

 _Now it is just the two of them._

 _He cups her elbows in his arms, pulling her to him. His eyes are full of thoughts of her, just as they are full of her reflection when she looks into them. Elisa wants so desperately, so achingly to stay there, to spend her eternity looking at him and twirling in his arms. She almost cannot tear herself out of them. His webs and scales pull her in like magnetism._

 _But it cannot be._

 _She pulls herself from his grasp and starts to plod away. Elisa's legs tremble with her hurt so intensely that she nearly trips. She wants to trip to break her ankle, to dash her face against the rough concrete just so_ something will hurt more than this.

 _As she leaves, he changes. His face contorts, eyes narrow for the first time. He chirps, confusedly at her, wondering where she and all his friends are going. One of those sounds, dredged from the pits of his lungs, breaks in half from the weight of the hurt in it. Only one half of it escapes him and reaches Elisa. One half is all it takes to shatter her._

 _Memories flash in her._

Egg.

Music.

 _Glen Miller in T - 4._

 _Her hands slick with his blood as she tugs at his chains._

 _Dumping chemical into her bath, willing the god within to revive._

Glad to have you as a friend.

 _His claw on her neck, tracing the cords of muscle there as crashing waves fill her ears and sex._

 _Standing before him, guileless. Natural. Naked._

 _Dancing in her flooded bathroom._

 _Holding him like a cliff ledge as Giles looked on._

 _She wishes she could speak. She wants to scream and scream until her form gives out, until her soul burns away._

 _For one moment, the world is silent, as the creature is, both accepting of this hated rift. The rain drums. Giles looks at her now. For the first time in years, he signs._

Do it.

 _She nods, and before she can stop herself she turns around. Beholding him now, more in pain than he was under the knives and prods of OCCAM. Having more trouble breathing than when his spines fluttered and his lungs scorched for chemically treated water._

 _His massive fingers bend and flex, signing._

You . . . and me . . . together.

 _Her head shakes. Elisa has to make him understand._

Together - no. Without me. Without me. _She repeats the last words, begging._

 _He approaches her now, gills on end and eyes dark. His brow is furrowed. The creature gets within two feet of her before she pushes him back, lightly. Elisa edges him toward the canal. All the while she turns her face to marble as best she can. She can't show how badly this will tear her. His life depends on her._

You have to go -

 _He hisses, frustration and betrayal. His signs override hers._

No . . . do not want to -

Please.

 _This final word is slung at him, fired like an arrow. As it pierces the hide of his understanding it stings, and he roars at her, every fin and spine on edge. Suddenly Elisa is frozen. She sees in his eye that same monster from the lab, that one she offered an egg in a faithful concordat. That one, she does not know, he who hardens his soul to the unfamiliar world around him. She slays him and he reverts again to the beast. Always on guard. But even this melts away._

 _He rasps, low and defeated._

 _A thud of knuckles on flesh and a scream ring from the van. The rain hides it, but Elisa suddenly hears the familiar bark of Strickland before three_ bangs _of a revolver seal her fate forevermore._

 _The creature falls to the ground._

 _She goes with him._

* * *

 _Strickland has won._

 _The old man is subdued, the disobedient Fuller sobs into her hands amid "motherfucker!" tearing its way from her lips. The horror from the river is quiet now. Blood smolders from two holes in its right pectoral. It will trouble him no more, and it spent its last few moments knowing he had triumphed over it. Strickland has beaten it, proven himself. It feels better than watching footage of Midway had._

 _He turns his face up to the rain, ignoring the crawling fingers of the mute lacing into the Asset's (He'd pegged her for a freak, but really? The thought made his skin crawl.). It makes him clean again. The blot on his honor, shaded in when he'd lost his fingers, is gone now that he has defeated his ancient adversary. The rain washes it away._

" _I do not fail," he says to no one in particular. Perhaps to Hoyt, or Uncle Sam, God? "I deliver."_

 _Wood scrapes across the concrete behind him, and Strickland turns just in time for the thunder and a wooden beam to turn his vision white._

* * *

 _Dmitri twists the steering wheel in his hands, maneuvering through Baltimore's sloshing streets dangerously. He nearly sheers the right mirror off of the car as he speeds down the road, too close to the driver next to him. For all his speed, all his weaving and frantic checks in his rearview, he feels slow. Time slows down and he feels like a slug in steel rims._

 _They are not going fast enough. He feels their window closing. They won't be able to release him in time._

 _His mind goes back to the phone call he'd made, after he spoke with the artist. His expressive eyebrows knot in guilt as the stoplight throws red over his face, almost as if it recognizes his betrayal._

 _Dmitri hopes Mihalkov is a faster driver than he._

* * *

 _Her bottom lip trembles. She looks even smaller than she did in the tub earlier that day, spread over the creature, a scarlet blanket of dolor. More crimson sheens her, thick and cold at her abdomen. It is not her coat._

 _Her skin feels like ice as Giles holds her._

 _The other corpse, the one with blue and green skin, breathes._

* * *

 _He rises._

 _The rain pours upon him. It is fresh, clean, diluting all of the evil in the air. Drops of it drum upon his skin. Gravity makes them trace every scale and fin of his body on their way to the ground. Each trail they leave upon him saturates him. They fill him with power, return him to the vigor he knew in his home. Disease takes flight from his body and clarity returns to his ancient consciousness._

 _The creature remembers where he is, and what has happened._

 _The divinity within him manifests itself, light pulsing under his scales. Spouts of blood from his chest cap off as the wounds that made them disappear. He swipes once, only once. The metal afflictions humans flaunted so profusely are easily cured by him. One after another, they pop from his flesh and the clinks of them on the concrete mix with the tapping of the rain._

 _He turns to face his old rival, healed and strong and immune, and approaches. Their roles are reversed. Now he is the superior, and the human is the wounded one. His hand bleeds black and brown, two digits missing. Dark joy fills the creature's heart._ He _had taken those fingers._

 _Now he takes the rest._

 _Claws carve deep into his ribs, and clefted teeth suited to cracking crustacean shells now find themselves breaking bones. The human is torn asunder, and his screams are low, angry, like a dying tiger. Flesh is rended and nerves are sliced, ligaments give way to vengeful cuts. For a great and terrible few minutes, there is nothing but the sounds of death and dismemberment. After that, only gurgling and breathing, deep as the ocean._

 _The creature turns on the filleted corpse of his tormentor, leaving the friend of_ E-L-I-S-A _,_ Z-E-L-D-A, _silent for awe of the carnage. This chapter of his long, long life is done._

 _He returns to_ G-I-L-E-S _, bathed in the relieving blood of the torturer._ G-I-L-E-S _does not speak with the common mouth sounds of most humans. He does not even look up._

 _The awareness that sickness had stolen from him returns with the rain, and the creature knows what he has to do._

 _He scoops her up. She is carried like a comatose offering, ready to be sacrificed. The creature prepares her for her afterlife as he rises,_ G-I-L-E-S _and_ Z-E-L-D-A _looking on with anguish. He wishes he could speak, wishes he could make them understand._ E-L-I-S-A _is like a myth, too pure and too peculiarly preset to belong here, in their world. Now he takes her to Olympus, where she was meant to be._

 _His heart tells him that he should not, that this is selfish, he is_ stealing her from her friends _. But primitive practicality and the flooding lights of the strange insects humans traveled in drive that notion out. This will save her._

 _His scaly, blood drenched outline is preserved in the rain for only a moment after he jumps,_ E-L-I-S-A _in his arms._

* * *

 _The two of them sit in the rain, everything quiet. Their eyes fall on the spot where the pair disappeared into the water. Zelda wants to will them, force them back in time, in a reversed arc back onto land and into the world of the living. Giles just weeps their loss. Headlights from cars behind the pair carve shadows into the rain-soaked concrete that had until then been dark. Appropriately, the shadows look like them. They are human-shaped holes in the ample car light. They mirror the same human-shaped hole that now lies at the center of their universes ; in the watery nebula that had held Elisa Esposito._

" _I saw her," Giles breathes. "While our boy was tearing that agent open. She was still breathing. When he took her down, too. That's her, right there. That's Elisa. So stubborn . . ." A mournful wolf rises in his throat and devours the rest of the sentence. Zelda pulls him close, an arm around his shoulder._

" _She came out of the water . . . by herself. Fittin', that she didn't go back alone."_

 _The thought spreads solace in their hearts for a few instants, right before a gravelly voice calls out, in some guttural, foreign tongue._

* * *

" _Let out the nets! Guard these two!" Mihalkov strides past the man and the black woman on the ground, fedora darker than anti-matter with absorbed rain. Old, blue eyes study the canal waters as they distort with rain. Dmitri had said this was the place. Easternmost water access of Baltimore, with a confluence right into the Atlantic. The creature he'd seen so many sketches of would be here. Two proxies of his in black suits scurry past him. One carries the folded geometrics of a steel net, and the other holds a line of rope with which to bring the net back to earth ; once, of course, the Jormungandr-like prize of the creature is contained within. The splash of the metal cables against the water is barely audible over the thunder. One of the two on the ground, the man, gets to his feet. He barks some powerless threats in English, and Mihalkov nods at his enforcer, Arkady. The great, red-bearded bear of a man knocks the interloper to the ground and his hat slips from his head. Grayish hair grows there, thin, but curled and new. Arkady levels his Makarov at him and the colored woman, growling something in English at her. Mihalkov had never bothered to learn it, preferring the hard sounds of his own Russian. Moscow had also never commanded him to, with his position as spymaster. All of the interactions he took part in outside the Motherland were with other Russians._

 _It sounds like a zipper when the net ties shut, and Arkady passes his gun to an underling so he can lend his tremendous strength to pulling the weight of the creature onto the ground. He, the proxies and two other KGB attachés Mihalkov doesn't recognize grip the rope that binds the net shut. In short intervals, like an industrial crank, the thing is hauled out of its domain._

 _There it is, wriggling, alive, hissing, angry as Kamchatka bears. Its blue and gold and green iridescent hide has been split by the net, bleeding in curved lines. All the same, it has all the earmarks of a healthy predator that has been rudely, rudely awakened. Unfurling like an eel, it swipes futilely at the men who wrangled it, standing between them and a small, red and white bundle._

 _Mihalkov draws closer and Arkady yells for sedative. It looks like a woman, on her knees. She is soaked to the bone. The heavy red coat she wore must have been like a sandbag on her with all of the liquid it absorbed. A single red high heel cups her right foot, and her neck is alive. It wriggles hideously, convulsing, with six slashes in it. Had this creature killed her? No, Mihalkov realizes. She lives and it guards her._

 _As this occurs to him, he and the beast lock eyes. There is something in those wet, brass pits. Something old and primeval dwells there. It sees the lightbulbs in the old Russian's head, and for a second, fear pierces the animalistic hostility. The eyes soon close, after a roar of pain at the syringe planting itself in its shoulder blade._

 _It drops, unmoving in its bonds. The mass behind it moves, and it is a woman indeed. She throws herself upon him, shielding him. Dark eyes gaze up at the men, pleading, and her hands move in complicated ways, ways Mihalkov cannot interpret. All the while, her neck flutters and sweeps like a skin tide._

 _The creature's blood and hers mix as the syringe implants in her neck. Hand movements rapidly slow and die mid-gesture and her eyes blink shut._

 _A door slams open. Segmented metal on a track. A trailer. More KGB men are here, rolling cylindrical tanks the size of beds on wheels to the two downed divinities. They hold water within them, greenish with what looked like algae floating on the surface. As the woman and the monster are imprisoned within them, tires screech on the water and Mihalkov turns._

* * *

 _Dmitri is out of the car in seconds. The scene is at its inevitable end. He passes Strickland's corpse, looking as if a bear had mangled it. He passes the artist, and Zelda, frozen at the point of an agent's pistol. Dmitri berates him in Russian, slapping down his gun arm, avoiding the artist's look of shock, and trying to block out the hate in Zelda's voice as she comes to._

" _This was you, wasn't it?" She growls, her teeth gritted. "You weren't trying to help us out . . . you just needed a way to get him outta the lab that didn't implicate you!"_

" _It's not like that," Dmitri replies, barely audible. Their eyes do not meet and the rain suddenly feels much colder. "It was the only way. I didn't think you'd be able to outpace his pursuers."_

" _Yeah, well," Zelda's lips purse angrily. Her hand points to the destroyed carcass of Strickland. "We didn't. He's got something in him . . . somethin' old and mighty as Moses himself. I guess you'll be seein' plenty of that wherever you're taking 'im."_

" _Taking him? You mean he is still here?"_

 _She spat at his feet. "Fuckin' commie."_

" _Dmitri!" Mihalkov calls, waving the spy over, and Dmitri looks on Zelda and the artist for the last time. The night swallows them now, and their paths cease their intersection. "You made the right call. There was no cordon, no escort or Intelligence Agency assets sent to deter us. It went over perfectly."_

 _As is the usual dance between them, Dmitri skirts around Mihalkov's "friendliness". "Where is it?"_

 _Mihalkov smiles, gesturing to_ two _tanks being pattered by the rain. "_ They _are right here. Now, we will have to make arrangements for the flights through the West Berlin Corridor-" Mihalkov's words are lost in the booming storm, and all Dmitri can do is run ; run to them._

 _The scaly, hinged visage of the Asset pokes from the water, eyes closed in sedation. Next to him, although separated by glass, Elisa floats. Her mouth opens and closes in reflex as she breathes through the new gills on her neck. Dmitri is dumbfounded._

 _As he boards an aircraft at New York International, he stays that way ; mouth ajar ever so slightly, wondering how things had gone so far off course._


	3. Razdeleniye

His veins and ligaments filter out the sleep-sap he'd had forced on him, and his marble eyes open.

Greeting him is a large room, dimly lit, with concrete floors. Red tile and more ugly, unsympathetic cement made the walls and the ceiling. A great pit occupied the center. More tile, scarlet as blood, penned water within it, and apparatus of chain and light bulb and electrode hangs from the ceiling above it. It points down, like a lightning bolt, into the unstirred liquid below it. An empty tank faces him along a lonely stretch of stone floor, and a mighty steel portal dominates the wall to his left.

The rest of the room is much of the same; tile and concrete and tools and tanks that he was familiar with. But where had that kinship come from? His mind, now free and aware, was nonetheless groggy. First and second eyelids slide into place as he marauds around his mind. Concentrating, he slips into reminiscence, memory of this room, but not.

The tile came first. He envisioned it vividly. In his mind, it boxed him in, surrounded him. But, he recalled it comfortingly. It was a different hue, one that drummed up images of his home, shrouded and ancient, teal with salt and sun. Only rarely would it ever be so flushed in crimson. When it changed, it was jagged in its ruby tang, like a chameleon. Pain laced those moments when it did. The memory of them pierced his scales with terror, and one lance became many as he looked at these new, bloody shapes on the wall.

Next he observed the concrete. It was authoritarian, a steel giant's fist on his soul, the only goal of whom was control. It caged him, robbed him of his dearest faculties. Where went the sun and the moon, when this grotesque, lifeless shield stole them from him? Without them, time is powerless. There is only the waiting and the hatred to keep him company.

A tray lays on a cart near the tiled, filled water pen. Tools line it, prods and drills and scalpels and needles. They're like dogs, so often used by the humans to chase him back to the water; silent, patient, but ready at their master's first call to attack. Stab. Devour. The metal contrivances are sinister. They strike and wound only when their prey is hobbled; tied down, weakened, too starved for water to fight back. Every spine on his body flares as he looks at them.

Finally, the tank.

He goes still where he floats. The recollection seizes him, cephalopodic, ghostly grippers drawing him into its maw. He can almost feel the stagnant water on his gills, filtered and filtered through his gills a hundred times. The light set in the back wall, fluorescent in spite of the liquid that threatened to short it out, is there again. It illuminates the whole tank in tepid, undead glows, keeping him from relief or sleep. Walls press in on him again as the cramped corridor of the tank returns. The dimensions of the space are intentional in their fickleness. He cannot find a space open enough to lie down; to rest!

Miraculously, a current blows in the imagined static water. Surprised, he puts his webbed hands out in front of him, preparing to paw his way backwards, and finds his fingers flat against clear, polished glass.

 _He is back there. The filthy, choking water is not imagined._ He is back in that dead, unfeeling place, only in some nightmare version of it; every tormenting aspect of it amplifies like the noise of a whirring boat propeller.

A distorted sound reaches his senses through the glass and the water. He had heard it many times. It found him whenever he longed to escape from the prison which _E-L-I-S-A_ had sprung him from. Whenever he felt that unbreakable tug on his neck, the heavy, metal clunking noise is heard.

He is roused from his own torment by a disturbance in the water-pen before him, at the center of the room. The chain goes slack. Whatever it leashes, below the water, is moving.

An outline darkens the surface of the water where it swims. Two arms and two legs sprout from its torso, and the shadow of stringy, kelp-like protuberances fountain around what must be the head. The water parts as those laces in its scalp break the surface. Darker than night, they are, a perfect contrast to the cream hue of the woman's skin. Eyes of grey and green look at him. An emotion shines in their irises, one he has seen before. He recognized it from the last prison. The human in blue, old and lethargic . . . _H-O-Y-T_ , his name-rock had said, possessed that same pitying glow in his eyes. They held no malice, not at all like those of the one with the pain stick. But neither did they impart anything kind or sympathetic. In both the eyes of _H-O-Y-T_ and of her, muted disdain and disgust for him gummed together into the green and brown of their irises.

It triggers a fault line in his heart, and it cracks as she rises from the water-pen, heavy bond of iron fastened around her neck. Her gills were smothered and her raven locks of hair were briny. Cheeks turned pallid, baggy and strained; she looks as though she hasn't slept in days. Of all the indignities she suffers there is none so unfair as her lack of clothing. The heavy fur she wore, the red one, has been discarded, leaving her as bare as when she had stripped herself of her many skins in her bathroom, and they'd made love. The rosy tips of her breasts pebble and harden in the air; he does not know if it is from the cold or the shame. Even though her entire body is on show, visible to whatever hell-hearted machinators had imprisoned them there, he suspects the former. Her teeth chatter so loud he can hear them through the glass and her shoulders tremble as she covers what intimate areas of herself she can.

The silence is their only companion as he and _E-L-I-S-A_ stand off across the laboratory.

* * *

He's seen her. The creature has seen her. Now it's an awkward, signless quiet as Elisa tries to formulate her thoughts. It's odd, to see him so quiet. He's certainly loud enough that any croaks or rumbles or chirps of his would easily transmit through the glass of the tank he's in. The betrayal that burned in her must have found its way into her eyes or her brows. Elisa knows she's never been a master of concealing her emotions. From the way the contempt written into her face has stunned him into silence, at least she knows she consistent in her obviousness.

She shivers. The water the Soviets keep her in is freezing. Chunks of chemical supplement cling to her skin in icy blobs, and the collar around her neck has been cooled into a sub-zero vice around her new, miraculous gills. The tremors from the cold jog her mind, and she juggles signs in it. What would she say to him? What would make her anger stick?

What could she say?

He had died, she had been mortally wounded. He'd returned to life, murdered a man, rescued her from the brink of death, given her gills, and then they'd both been captured by agents of the Soviet Union and hauled halfway across the world. What words could two people, even amphibious ones, exchange after sharing such rare happenstances in life?

Elisa aches to move. Her small, lithe hands tug at the collar. She wished so desperately to be free, to end the chafing on her gills, the tight soreness in her neck from the chain pulling her head back. She wants her clothes back, wants her red, warm coat back. She wants Giles, and his hieroglyph couch back, and his cats and his smile and his warmth. Elisa wants Zelda back, wants her cracks and her jokes and her refreshing regularity back. She even wants him back, more desperately than ever as she looks at him, but the love in her heart is drowned in her outrage.

This feeling of having been robbed, robbed of home . . . this must have been how he felt.

The answer falls into Elisa's brain like a tidal wave has just hurled it there.

She remembered the creature's hearing, sharp as a sword when she'd lured him in with an egg, and she paddles up to the rim of the water-pen. Elisa's fingernails, paint chipped away but still more or less healthy, drum on the red tile. His golden gaze suddenly focuses, attentive, eager. Elisa's harsh look keeps the creature from presenting his happiness, his hope, but she's known him long enough to see that he is bursting with it.

 _Do you love me?_ She signs.

The creature blinks, her question odd. Incredulously, he trills and signs back to her.

 _Of course . . . love . . . E-L-I-S-A!_

 _Do you wish you'd never been caught?_

 _E-L-I-S-A?_

Her teeth grit together, and she signs again, carrying the context the creature craved on her fingers.

 _Wish that, never taken? From flowing water. Bad man, stick. S-T-R-I-C-K-L-A-N-D. Take you from home. Wish, never happened?_

Finally learning the name of his ultimate adversary, the creature flares, unraveling like a giant snake. He expands in the tank. Fins on the side of his head open and his arms and spines outstretch. He doubles in size, no doubt some eon-old evolutionary feint to ward off attackers. Like a long forgotten saurian, he warbles in his tank, quiet anger bubbling under his scales.

 _Was . . . happy . . . in home. Torn away. Miss . . . many things. But . . . that time . . . over. Time in . . . place . . . love, over. Time . . . alone, over too. Things . . ._ A clawed finger taps his pectoral plates, and then points at Elisa. _Move . . . on._

 _I wasn't alone. If you love me, then why did you take me away?_

Elisa breathes, throatily and ragged. Before she can stop herself, all the resentment pours from her like a crack in a dam.

 _The same thing that happened to you?_ She motions like Strickland so often did, raising an imaginary cattle prod high above her drenched head. _You do to me. You took me from my friends. These?_ Elisa's gills flutter and she points to them, daring the creature to break her gaze. _Can I ever go back, with these?_

Blue luminance branches in his flesh, which Elisa's come to associate with his emotions running high. In pain, distress, love, lust, and contentment, the azure light from within him glows. Elisa supposes that now it is guilt. _Thought . . . E-L-I-S-A, want to be . . . together!_

Her eyes tickle, and she can feel tears lace out of them.

 _I did! But I wanted it to be my way. I love them . . ._ She thunks herself on the forehead. _Love G-I-L-E-S, Z-E-L-D-A, just as much as you. They were there for me since the start. Now I don't know if I can ever see them again._

Anger cluttered her mind. She had taught him so little, and Elisa had to strain her vocabulary tightly enough as it was. How to express herself, and keep herself on that one track of thought she had that worked? What would make the creature realize that for once in her life, she'd just wanted something _on her terms_? Elisa didn't want to settle, didn't want to sit in the proverbial windowsill and tell herself _well it could be worse_. Not this time; not after the unknown wonder she'd found in the creature. Couldn't she just have this one, pure little flame stay alight? Couldn't she have her creature, in the ocean where he would be healthy, and her friends, on land where they could breathe?

That track of thought is ripped up when the creature fills the hole in the conversation.

 _Wanted . . . E-L-I-S-A, safe. E-L-I-S-A, leak. Red, bad. Plug!_

 _I'd rather have died, in your arms with you, than live knowing I can't go to them._

At this, the creature's face turns sour, mad as a barracuda. Elisa thinks she knows the last thing Pandora saw before the poor cat had been devoured.

 _If . . . choice . . ._ he points to himself. _Or . . . G-I-L-E-S, Z-E-L-D-A . . . E-L-I-S-A, always choose other. Talk . . . about . . ._ Another gesture to his scaly body. _Take you? When . . . S-T-R-I-C-K-L-A-N-D . . . take? Trap, all alone. No . . . other._

He brings his signing, slimy hands up to his face, eyes barbed, cruel and hurt. The last few hand movements are choppy, barely concentrated.

 _When . . . take?_

 _E-L-I-S-A, ALWAYS . . . HAVE . . . ME._

Then, huffing, he turns in his tank, back to her. His spines flatten like a weary dog's ears might.

Elisa taps again on the tile, trying to magnetize him and the crucial sign he'd learned back to her.. The creature ignores her.

Salt tears indistinguishable from the artificially brined water, Elisa sinks below the surface again, and is soon out of sight.

* * *

He swims to the back of his tank, now awash in that unholy lamp set into the wall.

Trapped in a darker taste of that grey penitentiary, with his one ally set against him, the creature screams and screams and screams.

* * *

Deja vu hangs suspended in Dmitri's mind as he treads purposefully through the mock T - 4 laboratory his countrymen had built. He can't shake the feeling that he's done this before, that he's walking this path for the second time. It reminds him of his time at OCCAM, when he had implored Strickland to see some measure of humanity in the water creature and think of it as a living being. Dmitri doesn't seek to convince anyone anymore. After failing to convince Strickland, Mihalkov, Zelda, he'd come to the conclusion that America's rigors and its stresses had dug an early grave for his persuasiveness. Dmitri didn't have any soul for euphemisms or arguments anymore; much better to do as the Red Army had in the last World War : be clear, direct, undeterrable.

Now, he does not seek opinion, or to change anyone else's; he only wants answers.

The concrete clicks under his finely polished boots, and Dmitri finds he's started to adopt the comforts of being home, as well as the terrors; he is back in KGB uniform. The grey shapka is a warm delight on his balding scalp, so used to rain and cold. The two columns of buttons up the front of his long, ash-colored tunic gleam gold. The same shine catches the gold belt around his heavy middle, every time he passes under a light fixture. Strips of red fabric adorn his collar and shoulders, positioned a few hours ago by his tan glove-covered hands. Dmitri hadn't been in the uniform for years, not since he'd departed Leningrad for New York and then Madison, all those years ago. It had laid dormant, nail-bitingly hidden at the bottom of a suitcase he'd reserved for a hasty return home, in case of compromisation.

Now it is back on, and for all the contempt Dmitri has for being part of the KGB, the familiarity of the suit clears his head. He breathes in it easier, like clean air. The Order of Lenin, pinned to his uniform's right breast, certainly doesn't hurt. The silver likeness of Vladimir Ilyich sparkles under the light; the brass and red enamel of the surrounding wheat, star, hammer and sickle, and Ilyich's name in Cyrilic turn to gold-ringed rubies under the lamps in the ceiling. Dmitri had never seen one, not until he'd earned it for bringing his masters their prize. He'd read _Pravda_ copies with whole pages of soldiers from the Great Patriotic War being awarded lesser medals. Occasionally, he'd recognize a name, a man he'd been to school with as a boy.

He approaches a wooden door, strangely warm in color against the cadaver-like tone of the concrete wall. A plexiglas, rectangular window has been built into the center, and through it Dmitri sees more colors, muddled and warm. Through it, Dmitri hear's the scratchy, earthy sound of The Song Of The Volga Boatmen, being spun on a record player. He liked that song, vaguely remembering hearing it as a child somewhere. A half-recollection surfaces. One of his teachers had mentioned something about the subject of the song being burlaks, hauling barges upstream in the old Russian Empire. Dmitri's shocked the song is on. This is Semichastny's office, he admits as he raps three times on the door; the man would play The Dark Eyes for hours on end-

He opens the door, and Mihalkov looks up from the dark wood desk, lamplight accenting every line sketched into his old skin. Semichastny sits across from the spymaster, having traded out his uniform for a simple, curt-looking black suit. He looks too much like Strickland in it.

"Ah, Papov," Semichastny says with a warm, marbled smile. "Comrade Mihalkov and I were just reviewing the procedures the Kremlin has advised we conduct while we have these creatures in our grasp. I was about to have you sent for; I want you to review them. You've more experience with them than anyone in the country. It only makes sense, no?"

Dmitri's taken aback by this. That'd been exactly what he'd come to ask. Cosmically, the entire thing seemed like too swift an interaction. He blinks, and all that accompanies the three Russians is a soft-sounding tale of tsarist burlaks.

"Uhm . . . of course, Chairman! " Dmitri replies. He snaps a few times, trying to convince his words to move past the dam of his surprise. "When will the experiments be ready?"

"Why, whenever you are ready. The Premier has taken your long journey and your recent operation into account. The Americans have no idea where the creatures are; one our agents, the one we instructed to take your place in Baltimore, tells us that their CIA patrols up and down the East Coast of the States looking for them. The Caribbean, Central America . . . we had better hope they don't come knocking on Fidel's door again, eh?" The Chairman laughs, and nods to Mihalkov. The older Russian hands him a tan folder, with top secret in Cyrilic on the front.

"The point is, Papov," Semichastny continues. "That we have all the time in the world to glean what we can from these things. You deserve a bit of, how do the Americans say, 'R & R'. Take a few weeks to just live a little, hit the town, maybe visit your sister in Volgograd! After that, return to Moscow, find out what you can, and we can dump these two into the Volga. They'll cease to be our problem, and they won't have a route to the Atlantic. The Caspian will be a fine home for them."

His sister? Dmitri doesn't hear the rest of Semichastny's sentence as the mechanical whims of his mind start to move. She'd be banging down the steel doors of the lab already if she knew he were back home. He could picture her, in her usual brown dresses, trudging across the Volga towards Moscow with nothing but the clothes on her back. Years without being able to send her letters, years of her wondering whether he was alive or dead, and she's as silent as the grave once he is back in the Union. Only one thing would have caused Nadia Papov to treat her brother that way.

"You mean she has not been notified I have come home?"

A phone rings at Semichastny's desk, temporarily drowning out the song. Semichastny rises, waving Dmitri and Mihalkov off. "That'll be all, comrades. Papov, look over the experiments. Where they aren't sound, make them." The two of them rise, trudging out of the office as the Volga Boatmen is hushed into silence. The door closes and before it does, Dmitri swears he hears Semichastny answer the phone, heartily with _Krushchev!_

The next sound that reaches his ears is Mihalkov, chuckling.

"You know, Dmitri, the Chairman's naive intentions to keep those mutants alive remind me of you. I stand by what I said before : we don't need to learn. Better to put them in the ground than in the Volga. The American CIA is too prolific to risk it."

"Don't be too harsh, Mihalkov," Dmitri replies, barely keeping the sentence above the seas of fractured thoughts in his brain. His intense eyes dark all around the concrete hallway. "Semichastny has run this organization effectively enough, even if he has too much heart for our kind of work. I know we were all shocked when Krushchev appointed him Chairman -"

The older man gnashes his teeth. "Idiot," he growled. "He's barely held the post for a year. Do you know how many operations he's asked me to take over? He almost had me assume command of the research you'll be conducting. He is a young, idealistic fool. Krushchev virtually made _me_ Chairman when he put that surrogate in office."

Dmitri's eyes catch Mihalkov's for a moment, and they remain locked there. The old man is severe, disgusted, like he had stepped on some pallid and viscous worm. His pupils are focused, sword-sharp, a stark parallel to the muck of contempt in them. Commitment, the color of the blackest oceans, and unfocused hatred as cold as hell share space in the spymaster's blue eyes.

Why does everyone in Moscow remind Dmitri of Strickland?

"I am the one who travels the earth, who sees the dirt and the filth of what we choice belongs to me, not the Chairman. I will not compromise the security of this project by allowing those monsters to leave Moscow alive. When you are done . . ." Mihalkov spits the next word like scorching poison in his mouth. " _Learning_ , as you so love, they will be disposed of. I suggest you take your time, comrade. When you are done with them when I am done with them, nobody will learn anything from them ever again; the road to Berlin taught us that much."

Mihalkov has edged his way close to Dmitri, their faces inches from each other. Dmitri knots his eyebrows, relenting at Mihalkov's harsh words and inflections. The older Russian stalks away now, down some endless concrete corridor of the Soviet T - 4. Teeth clenched and cutting the syllables short, Dmitri whispers.

"There is a _woman_ in there, Mihalkov."

He lifts his head up, eyes burning into his rival's back as he treads away.

"A breathing, miracle of evolution, too," Dmitri says, louder this time. He shakes his fist at his inattentive spymaster's back, bellowing.

"There is a _woman_ in there!"

Mihalkov soon vanishes around a corner, and all of Dmitri's carefully fielded relaxation burned out of him in a instant. He scratches at his uniform.

It feels stifling, suffocating, like it is hard to breath in.


	4. Otritsat', Prinimat'

The worn index of American Sign Language disappears into the woolly depths of Dmitri's fur coat as he passes by a Red Army guard. There was a slight _umpfh_ of the paperback cover on the metal of his belt, but the coat had swallowed it sufficiently enough. The guard stared ahead with disciplined boredom, no inkling of the contraband Dmitri carried. He dares not take it out again for a final come-over of its weary pages. Getting it in the first place had been difficult enough. He just hopes that the few seconds he'd gotten at the half a dozen crimson stoplights between his apartment and the facility had been enough study time. True he was intuitive, but language with hands only? English had been hard enough!

7-3-4-7 go his fingers against the lock for the water creatures' laboratory, and a buzz and a scraping of an opening door greet him. Dmitri's conscience, taxed into a coma in America and laxed into complacency in the Soviet Union, is blazing now. It yells at him, stinging his ears until he listens to its commands. The lab and facility around him, all the concrete and tile, doesn't just look like OCCAM because he'd smuggled schematics out of Baltimore; no, some cosmic, over intelligent thing had made it so. Both locations, on opposite sides of the planet, shared so much context. The water creature was suffering and trapped here, as in OCCAM. It would be poked and prodded and tortured, as it was in OCCAM. It was surrounded by people who viewed it either in commiseration or contempt; OCCAM, too, was manned by people who saw it that way. Strickland, even in death, hounded the amphibian man. Dmitri saw him in Mihalkov every day. So too had Strickland stalked the halls of OCCAM. Only now, thanks to Dmitri, two innocents are caged and forced into misery, instead of one.

It is for this that his sense of right and wrong berates him.

Today, like the day he'd caught Elisa trying to unhook the creature from his collar in T - 4, he listens to it. Today Dmitri doesn't grip it in his hand and squeeze until it is breathless and silent. He nurtures it; that seed of good in his heart, so often ignored and shunned, gets watered now.

Before Mihalkov had even rounded the corner after their standoff, his pragmatic brain had started turning, theorizing, plotting and analyzing. That machine was well-oiled after assassination and counterintelligence operations by the dozens; it knew what to do. It had happened almost without his knowledge. Dmitri'd been so pinned, rooted in the dire knowledge that those in charge were decidedly not. As soon as that fallout had dissipated, the planning became clear. He had to release them. Somehow, sometime soon, before whatever experiments the Kremlin had specified were completed, he had to get Elisa and the creature out. Justice demanded it. Dmitri still believed himself a good man, flying in the face of all the evil he'd done. A good man would correct the error made in Baltimore. But first, he'd need them, their acknowledgment, forgiveness and their allegiance.

So, conscience and practicality and Dmitri decussate into an atom-bomb of clear, perfect drive. It's the first time he's felt right since he's returned home.

The steel door retracts into the wall, and the way is open. Dmitri slips inside, removing his shapka from his head and placing it on one of the alcoves in the wall closest to him. The lab is quiet, and aside from the occasional click of boots or the ghost of a balalaika on a record player, all is quiet. Dmitri checks his watch, eyes roving over the blocky gold numbers. The train for Volgograd doesn't leave for an hour. There is still time.

Like ancient and bitter krakens, they emerge from their respective waters.

From out of the murkiness of the tube-tank on the wall, the water creature surfaces. Though his cramped and tepid quarters are uncomfortable, he at least looks healthy to Dmitri. Surely, not being injured and tormented with a cattle prod daily contributes to that. He'd also written down hard boiled eggs as part of the creature's required diet; ironic, that he ate better than millions of Soviets from the Socialist Republics in Central Asia. The endless chameleon eyes of the creature harden, noticing the man who'd failed so terribly to protect him. He stays silent, but Dmitri sees bubbles coalesce in front of the creature's countenance. He's huffing, like a maddened bull preparing to charge.

Then there is Elisa.

She's bound about the neck with the same make of chain he'd seen cage the creature so often. The gills the creature had inexplicably given her, that defied every edict of science itself, slap softly and wetly on her neck as she rises. Seeing who it was, Elisa drops back into the water up to her chest. The liquid hides her nudity. His countrymen had robbed her of her clothes and she looked sleep-deprived. All the same, her eyes burn when she looks at Dmitri, very much awake.

The creature's hands begin to move and they catch both Dmitri and Elisa's eyes. Dmitri catches a few slivers of the larger message. The amphibian man's hands are odd; the signs are slow but still unrecognizable under scales and webs and twitches.

 _You- him- here?_

For an instant, the idealist and the child in him, that he thought he'd buried in Russia but had risen from the dead in that bar with his spymasters, manifests. The creature could sign! Elisa had taught it to, in essence, speak! The feat was on par with teaching an ape to sign. What did this mean for the creature's intelligence, consciousness, the way its memory functioned? Kilograms and cranial measurements and frontal lobes cycle in his head, until he sees the way Elisa looks at the creature. Like she's been accused of murder. It's now that he realizes something is wrong. The glances, the ease with which their features turned sour . . . Something had happened between them. Elisa fires back, swift and argumentative. Dmitri guesses he would have caught more of her words had it been slower.

 _No. How- say-_

Her fellow amphibious lifeform responds.

 _Hurt- you so- you- me-_

His knuckles rap on the tile of Elisa's water-pen. The stare that greets Dmitri as her head whips around is daggers in his chest. "Ms. Esposito?" Dmitri says in English, not looking her in the eye and gulping lightly. "I'm not here to torture or gloat. But, we need to speak." Again, she's mako-swift, and Dmitri waves her down. Too close in his movements towards the water creature's companion, the Russian pushes down the rush of cold fear at the low, chittering growl coming from the tank he faces away from.

"Slow," he motions to Elisa. "I cannot track what you're saying." He wishes Zelda were here, or the artist; an instant translator more proficient than any book. Convincing them to trust him again will be hard enough without the communication barrier. Elisa's teeth grind together and Dmitri can almost feel the scream that some other, voiceful Elisa out in the cosmos would sling his way. She breathes deep, smoothing, and signs at him. Her movements are mechanical, beat-like.

 _Give me a good reason why._

"Because," Dmitri replies. "I am in a situation you, more than anyone, are familiar with. I am the only one in this facility, maybe the only one in the country, who has your best interests at heart-" Dmitri pauses for a moment. "Can he hear me in there?" He nods at the creature, who seems like a third wheel to the dialogue between the two humans. Elisa signs Yes.

"Good," Dmitri continues for a moment. "As I was saying, I am the only one who wants to see you prosper. Once, you were the same for our friend here. The overseer of the lab, Semichastny, plans to put you both into the Caspian Sea once whatever research we conduct is done. My spymaster, Mihalkov sees this as a security risk, doesn't plan on letting either one of you leave the facility alive. I suspect he's got greater pull within the KGB than anyone realizes, which means the higher-ups are not on our side. The three of us . . ." He gestured to both amphibian . . . people? "Are not on good terms at best, are not on speaking terms at all, at worst. But the same was true at OCCAM, and you and I, Ms. Esposito, still managed to get him out. What do we have if not each other? A train leaves for Volgograd, a riverfront city, in an hour. I can have both of you on it, with me, and we part ways at the end of our trip. You both do what you will."

He looks at the floor now, pleading.

"I failed you in Baltimore, all of you. I let my arrogance get in the way of keeping him safe. In the end, I duplicated the suffering, not destroyed it. Now, I have two options. I can either save you or let you die. Let me fix my mistake, please. Come with me, Elisa."

Her face twists in an aggrieved, lip-biting smile. Tentacles of disdain and anger spread all over her face, like an octopus enveloping prey. Elisa's fingers are jagged, strained as she signs. She keeps the same pace as she has throughout their conversation, although now that fact hammers the defeat into Dmitri's head slower and harder; it lets him absorb it. The creature has already turned and swum back into the tank, defeated as well. Perhaps his primeval mind believes it's fate, that he die never seeing the sun again, entombed in cement and tile and glass.

 _I lost my friends. I lost my love. I lost my home. I've had a chain around my neck for I don't know how long. I've slept in water filled with poison. I've had my clothes taken from me. I've been hauled into a country that hates me because of you. I DIED. What life do I have to lose?_

* * *

Out in the hallway, Arkady is silent. He lets Dmitri prattle on to the two mutants in their tanks; no need to rush it. Dmitri had no idea he was there, no idea his entire plot had been overheard and jotted down in the bear-man's mind. Arkady pulled back the hammer on the Makarov strapped to his rib, just in case. He hears some kind of slapping noise, wet flesh on flesh. It must be the fish-woman, speaking those strange languages with her hands. Someone that night on the docks had called it what . . . ASL? Not that Arkady cared terribly. English, Russian and big fists had gotten him far in the world. A particular sentence or two from Dmitri, in the laboratory, at once catches Arkady off-guard and perks up his ears. "A train leaves for Volgograd, a riverfront city, in an hour. I can have both of you on it, with me, and we part ways at the end of our trip. You both do what you will," Dmitri said.

Arkady takes off down the hall, briskly walking. He's got what he needs. A row of phonebooths lines the wall at the end of the corridor. Mihalkov's at the Kremlin Presidium now, speaking with the Presidium's Chairman. The large man flips the dial three times and Mihalkov's gritty voice, and a bit of static, fills the receiver a few moments later.

"I am with Chairman Brezhnev now, Arkady," He rasped from the phone. "What is it?"

"You're talking with the wrong Chairman, Mihalkov. Find Semichastny. Papov's making his move."

* * *

 _The Man In The High Castle_ opens in Dmitri's lap. A keening whistle blows somewhere outside, and the heavy, lumbering machinery shunts under his feet. Out the portal of the window, the train station gradually pans out of sight, and the snowy trees flash cold sunlight at him like a strobe light. Soon all that greets him through the glass is the endless, quiet expanse of Russian forests. It offers no distraction from the cycling and cranking of the mechanics in his mind, the constructing of a plan, an argument, a convincing. Dmitri is Russian; he's seen more than his share of snow-capped pines in his lifetime. After a few minutes, he gives up on the chance of seeing any animals. It is almost January. The bears will all be hibernating, and the flaming wheels of a train will scare away any deer or smaller predator. Dmitri looks back down at the book, running his fingers over the severe swastika and bursting sun of the vanquished Germans and Japanese. This was the second book he'd had to conceal in his fur coat. An attendant had walked down the aisle and asked him for his ticket. Now, with her gone, he could lose himself in a world that, for all its hellish evil, was fascinating.

He reflects on it. The Great Patriotic War was a distant thing for him. He and his sister, natives of Volgograd, had been evacuated hundreds of miles away when the Germans came knocking. It had been named Stalingrad then, and after they'd returned and been conscripted into the civilian reconstruction forces, he'd seen the oblivion the combat had wreaked upon his home. As the Red Army pushed forward across the country, closer to the enemy in a glorious tide of fury, so had Dmitri, Nadia and a thousand other proletariat, repairing what the fascists had torn down. Dmitri had seen many a dead man and woman then; it made killing for the KGB a triviality by comparison. After the war and his education were finished, he'd made mincemeat out of studies on the Germans' inventions: their rockets, the Zyklon B, their nuclear research, kaput as losses in Dmitri's home mounted; even their horrific, abhorrent racial pyramid. So many of the devices had been forged for killing and so many had potential to advance mankind towards the future. Such bevies of secrets were explored by the book's author, made possible by an impossible German victory. Dmitri was swamped by them when first he read the book.

As he thumbs through the pages, looking for those fictitious engrossings of alternate history, the silent plotter in his head keeps scribbling, keeps imagining, seeking some kind of salve to the problem of the creature and Elisa. When he finds the descriptions of the disgraced Reich's achievements, his practical intellect is out again, in his face. He can't concentrate on the words on the page. Dmitri flips again, going as far away as possible from the science fiction that had inspired his mind to turn on him.

So he substitutes it with another piece of science, far less fictitious.

From out of the bag at his feet Dmitri pulls a tan, slightly ruffled folder, stamped on its face with top _secret in Cyrillic. If he can't slip away from his troubles into a novel of the world as it might have been, he may as well confront them head-on. After all, there isn't any vodka on the train. He'll have to bear the knife for now._

The first few pages of the assessment are photographs. The water-creature is depicted from every angle, his shimmering markings and herculean muscles on display. They must have opened the tank in which he'd traveled to the air. Dmitri saw no collar or chains binding it. The fins on the creature's elbows, the spines down his back, and the delicate workings of his head and gills were all recorded in excessive photographs. Even his eyes had been snapped. A finger in the photo holds his sideways-closing eyelids up. The sedative must still have been working its way out of the amphibian man's system. When had they taken these?

Dmitri cringes and removes his eyes from the contents of the folder as the photos of Elisa begin to appear. The photographs are almost exclusively of her gills, but a few show off her stripped body. It's unclear to Dmitri whether these have any scientific relevance or if the photographers were just beasts.

The first page is as expected.

 _Intelligence suggests foreign creature capable of drawing oxygen from both water and air. One set of lungs used for each. Cartilage separates pairs of lungs. Surgery required. Perform on creature, test and take notes on both lungs, similarities, differences. End-goal: revision of cosmonaut equipment, base oxygen source, water. Replaces air. Launches carry more. Longer period of research in space._

Below this were anatomical notes, similar to those Dmitri had presented to Mihalkov. Surgical instructions were scribbled all over the body of the creature; where to cut, what to go through and what to leave untouched. A large, red mark circles the space between the creature's pectorals, above a strip of plated chitin.

 _Creature demonstrates ability_ _to self-repair wounds. Ability extends to other lifeforms. Unclear whether this is within definable scientific explanation or inexplicable. Potential for neither water or air-based oxygen supply requirement for space exploration. If replicable ability, cosmonauts heal damage sustained from space exposure. Additionally, standard military personnel have_ _potential to repair battlefield wounds automatically. Invalids or wounded military personnel must be acquired. Political prisoners from Lubyanka if necessary._

Two photos are on the next page. One of them is of the creature's left pectoral, near his shoulder. Two scars mark his dark green flesh. Dmitri recognized the quarter-sized, distended blemishes. He has two near his ribs, from where a KGB mole he'd discovered had put a pair of Makarov rounds in him. These holes marring the creature's skin are differently sized. In the next picture, the marks are gone. All that remains in their stead is dark green, shot through with teal and gold.

Next :

 _Female bears mutation, water breathing respiratory system added to physiology. Gills manifested on_ _throat_ _. Blood sampled. DNA altered to some extent. Most probably cause is foreign_ _creature. Transmission must be discovered. If genetic agent carried by creature_ , _must be isolated and studied. If once again inexplicable, ignore. Secondary study. Prioritize the first and second._

This one bears close up, magnified photographs of the gills that had formed from Elisa's scars. A gloved hand pulls them back in a couple of the pictures, exposing the pathways into her throat which water flowed into. The insides are fleshy, veined. These photos, like those of the original water creature, are in color. The different phases of motion the gills made when they breathed are recorded. The ebb of inhalation and the flow of exhalation each have their own photographs.

Different angles, in black and white this time, show off their positions on her neck from the left, right, and forward facing.

Dmitri flips to the next page, and as he reads his heart sinks.

 _Foreign creature demonstrates_ territorial _behavior. Examination of sedated female incensed it. Would have escaped confinement had it not been sedated. Further research lends towards connection due to courtship. Lends towards foreign creature possessing intelligence, higher brain function. Extends to human emotions? Female must be impaired. Elicit response from creature. To what degree human and what degree beastial_ _? Secondary study. Prioritize first and second._

This one has no pictures, and if it did Dmitri isn't sure he could look at them. Incredulousness and then outrage explode in his breast. They want him to torture a woman . . . a living, breathing woman, to get a rise out of the water creature, measure whether or not a soul indeed dwelled in its piscine skin. Didn't they see how clunky and impractical, never mind horrific the experiment was? He understood English. He could sign. He and Elisa knew both tongues respectively. Why not question him? Why not perform some kind of psychological test on him?

Why is the whole world so insane that their first solution is always to spill blood? Where had gentleness gone?

He wrestles with the wrongness and the evil of it for a long while. The sun turns a little paler and bluer as he does, sinking to be level with Russia's white-topped forests. Clouds and snow turn the sky grey, which peters out towards the horizon.

He feels bile in his stomach as he turns to the final page. Dmitri reads slowly, and the words are stamped in his brain with flaming letters.

 _Physiology of foreign creature more human than piscine. Sexual organs, while piscine in appearance, function as human organs do. Creature_ _is male. Capable of producing semen. If creature courts female, sexual relationship possibly developed. Semen capable of viable impregnation? Copulation coerced by any means necessary. If impregnation is successful, analyze eggs. Isolate gene for oxygen withdrawal from water_ _. If gills are prerequisite, continue regardless._ _Potential_ _for application in military personnel. Secondary study. Prioritize the first and second._

When the words finish branding their fiery tattoo in his mind, Dmitri is quiet. He shakes hands with his enraged conscience and his busy necessities, resolute and silent and vowing. He will free them or he will die trying. Dmitri has already made allies of his inner strengths. As he carries himself off of the stopped train, with legs barely conscious for the clenched rage that consumes his whole body, into the Volgograd train station, he knows that those won't be enough. Dmitri needs more than his emotions and his unceasing, ever-working brainpower.

He needs material friends. He needs allies in the physical world as well as the mental one.

Over the din of the crowds exiting their trains, Dmitri catches something. One word from a voice that echoed through decades of memories.

"Brother!"


	5. Nikolai

_Clink!_

Dmitri is hilariously, good-and-proper drunk. His chin is a little damp from when Nadia had told him a joke a few minutes ago and he'd nearly choked on his vodka laughing. Drops of the clear, sharp-smelling liquid dot his dress pants and the vest of his suit in splotches of grey. Dmitri's lightheadedness, brought on by his first buzz in months, certainly wasn't made any more manageable by the flickering of the candle fixture above his head. The bar was an old one, full of polished wood paneling and soft light. The building was from before the Revolution, when electricity had been a rarity in Russia. Before he had joined the KGB, Dmitri and Nadia had frequented it many a time. His heart had sunk when his sister had told him that the old owner, Misha, had passed away. Now the bar was in the hands of an uglier, more gnarled man who didn't have many nice things to say. As the night had worn on and Dmitri's faculties faded further and further away, he'd stopped caring. The new owner was more than capable of keeping the drinks flowing.

The mug in his hand hits the rough surface of the counter, fresh from delivering a burning river of vodka down his throat. Dmitri coughs and hacks. The sterilizing bite of the drink almost feels like it was drying his throat up rather than dousing it. With a soft slap of skin on skin in his ears, he feels Nadia's hand smack his shoulder blade, like one would burp a baby. He looks over at her, easily downing her fifth drink, and Dmitri sees double through his glasses. All the same, he giggles incessantly, and so does his sister. He'd forgotten what getting drunk with her was like. She was so fun! This must be what that park in California was like, what was it . . . Disneyland? Dmitri had never been, not that he cared at the moment. Nadia had some kind of chemistry about her, a chain reaction set off whenever she ingested alcohol that quickly spread from her to the people around her. Everything was so funny! All he'd done was look at her and suddenly the two of them are raving like loons. It's a good thing that there is nobody in the bar except for them that they can annoy. There is a large, red-haired man that passed out in a booth, but beyond that, it's only the two of them. Dmitri feels like he should recognize him, but his face is pressed into the wood of the table he sits at, out of view.

He decides that it has been too long since he was as wasted as he is now.

Dmitri feels young. He looks at his sister, taking in that familiar face that time and distance had made foreign. Nadia's smile is still tender, still curved and gentle, still lights up whatever room she's in. She is still wide at the shoulder and her hair is still an earthy, dark brown. It isn't touched by stress like Dmitri's is. All that worldly tension goes to her hands and her face. The tips of her fingers have had their prints burned off, and splotchy patches of skin are raised and scarred. From some of the horror stories he's heard, Dmitri supposes that Volgograd's automobile factories have treated her well. Deep creases around her mouth bely that the years have been hard on her too. Still, she is fair and funny and as refreshing as the drink that permeates his body. A nagging sprite in the back of his mind tells him that there was someone else he knew with lines like that near her mouth, someone important. He sees a moving, floating shape, suspended in midnight and teal liquid; light skin and dark, dark hair, she's tiny and ghostlike. What sensibility is left in his brain wonders who she is. What had happened to her? Had she drowned? She certainly doesn't look dry to Dmitri. Like swirling mirrors, tiny speckles of water dapple all over her skin. Her hair is flat to her head and soaked thoroughly.

One more gulp of vodka flushes out the intelligent part of him, and all he thinks about now is how fantastic life is. A bubble of alcohol and memories made flesh surrounds him, and no river god can claw through it.

Behind Dmitri, a chair's legs scrape on the wooden floor, right before the hammer of a pistol clicks and then-

BAM!

 _Earlier that day . . ._

A tight embrace ensnares Dmitri, seemingly having come from nowhere out of the maelstrom of people entering and exiting the Volgograd train station. At first, so many faces are rushing by him he can't quite pin down who it is attached to him. The crowds are seared together firmly, like meat juice in a cheburek. But fate doesn't take its time, and soon enough she emerges from a forest of blurred suits and dresses and crying babies.

All his frustration and fear, even the awful revelation on his train ride is gone as Dmitri hugs Nadia back, gripping tightly to the first and maybe last human connection he can truly trust. Her grip is softer, frailer, factory work and two children having taken their toll. "Sister! How've you been? How are the-" Dmitri almost has to shout over the crowd to get her attention after she pulls away, but she shakes her head.

"Later!" Nadia yells. "When we're out of this fucking crowd!" She tugs his free hand in hers towards a lonelier corner of the trainyard, mixing into the stream of people heading into the actual station building. Dmitri's suitcase and that damning folder inside it are almost ripped from his grasp by people bumping into the sides of it behind him. The crowd thinned out, and the snow ceased to fall onto Dmitri's black hat as he and his sister disappeared under a great metal awning. A few other people occupied benches behind them, but Dmitri's world shrinks as she hugs him again; twice as hard as a few minutes ago, unmolested by the crowd and allowed to lavish on her long lost brother all the grief that distance filled her with.

Dmitri returns the embrace for a long moment, and the cold stab of winter air fills his lungs.

"How did you know I was here?" He says, after a long moment. Nadia looks up at him, eyes twinkling, unwrapping herself from the hug. "The Chairman didn't make you aware I was back. When I asked, he ignored me. How'd you know I was coming to see you?" Nadia chuckles and cuffs him lightly on the back of the head.

"I had just put Aleksander and Ilya to bed, yesterday; I swear you wouldn't believe the day they had. I thought they were going to rip each other apart, they were so irritable," Nadia began, the sound of clicking feet and a rolling suitcase all that accompanied their voices in the snow. "I took a deep breath, thought 'this is where shift number two ends', wanted to watch the sunset from the porch. Then the phone rings. I growl. 'Grr. . . it's that bitch from the factory, trying to propose again. And what do I hear but the voice of Vladimir Semichastny on the line telling me a hero has returned home!"

Dmitri blushes and chuckles. "You're too kind, sister." He's glad that someone still thinks of him as a hero at this rate. The two of them begin plodding off towards the car that Nadia surely has parked somewhere, and Dmitri can almost feel the snow melting at the heat of their reconnection. "How are the children? Are they alright?" He asks after a few moment of silent walking. Nadia scoffs.

"Eh, they are growing up," She sighs. "Aleksander hates his work in the Komsomol; I keep finding him up at night, painting like his father. Independence is addicting, you know?"

"And Ilya?"

"When I told her you were in the country she practically exploded, like one of those defective Röchling shells we'd have to dig out of rubble back in the war. You remember those?"

"I do. A fucking terror, every time!"

"Every time! Ilya ran out into the snow barefoot yelling and reveling. I'm shocked a militsioner didn't come and haul me away for child abuse. It sounded like a damn murder!" They both laugh, and Nadia sighs. Dmitri swears he can see her replaying memories in her mind. "You know, you were there when she was born. She's wanted to be a scientist since she could speak. You must have imprinted on her or something, brother."

"Or her me," Dmitri replies. "Ducklings do that."

"Shut up!" His sister shoots back, laughing and cuffing him on the arm.

Then there is only walking. It's gotten a bit later than when Dmitri had arrived, the sky starting to melt into blue-black. All over the city, streetlights begin to turn on. They're flickering orange, degraded but rustic, and for Dmitri, a taste of home. The lights and the city's night life may have dusted the whole world a playful, comraderic orange, but Nadia just gets greyer and greyer the more she chatters and smiles. Dmitri's not sure if he should bring up why, and he battles with himself for a long moment before awkwardly blurting out-

"How are they doing without Nicholas?"

Nadia looks at him for a second her whole demeanor changing; almost daring God himself to come down from heaven and tell her that her brother had asked her something different. A well of liquid found both of her eyes, and she pinched them shut quickly and tightly. Dmitri's keen ears hear her sharp, low intake of breath, like she's been stabbed, though he pretends he didn't. Her eyes open again and then she's . . .

Fine again.

"You know, Dmitri," She says forcefully, and uncharacteristically cheerfully. "Old Misha may have bit it, but his bar is still standing. Some other old cunt runs it now. Fancy a drink?"

He's stuffed rupees in her hand before she'd even finished talking.


	6. Beshenyy

Vladimir Semichastny's mouth fell open.

The revelation undid him momentarily, and the shadows his desk lamp cast around his office seemed to grow, lengthening and becoming monstrously toothsome. Now they too looked like predators, all around him but invisible to the other KGB agents that frequented the building. His mind could rationalize it, but his heart couldn't. After all, if _Papov_ could switch coats so easily, anyone could.

"It pains me to be the bearer of bad news, Chairman," Mihalkov says from the chair across from him, though to Semichastny he sounds as though he's speaking underwater. "It truly does. Dmitri was a true devotee, socialist, and good man. I suppose working undercover for so many years takes its toll on a man's patriotism. Perhaps he was naturalized in Baltimore."

"And . . ." Semichastny lifts his eyes to meet the stark, glacier-blue of Mihalkov's. "You're sure of this? You have proper evidence?"

"I've worked with him closely even before he came home, Vladimir," Mihalkov replied. "He's a brilliant agent but Dmitri's . . ." he sighed. "Dmitri has always had too much heart for the KGB. I've had him watched for a fair length of time now. Arkady's never been a Shukov, but he is not half bad at stakeouts. He was making his usual rounds, tailing Papov, a few days ago; caught him in the laboratory where we keep those creatures."

Semichastny nods once. He doubts he could find the strength or the focus to give his underling any greater sign to continue.

"He offered to smuggle them away to Volgograd on his train and empty them into the Volga. I do not know the content of their interaction, comrade. Arkady tells me he was not _in_ the room, but I had him do the rounds on the laboratory and both water creatures are secure. Neither of them are able to speak so how our Dmitri was able to communicate with them, we have no idea."

"Does he know what the the Politburo and Krushchev will _do_ to our turncoat agents?!" Semichastny growls in a rolling wave of vocal desperation. "He's been with us for over a decade, Mihalkov. It's lunacy, I tell you. What would've possessed him to put himself, his sister, her children in danger like this?"

"I know, sir," Mihalkov consoles, laying a heavy hand on Semichastny's shoulder, just above his medals. Despite the solemnity in his voice, Mihalkov's hand is uncharacteristically warm, as if triumph burns within him. Semichastny almost recoils. So warm is the other man that his medals feel like they're melting into white-hot slag. But the register in his sensorium is imagined. "As I said, perhaps he was compromised on his last tour of duty. I don't think it matters as of late, if I may speak freely."

"No, it doesn't. Especially since he's six hundred miles from here with all our full research documents. Since he returned home he's been a _fucking_ mole . . . pardon my language . . ."

Mihalkov takes the seat opposite Semichastny, and he's grateful that the taller, older man bars his vision from flitting to the monstrous shadows he'd imagined a few minutes ago. A small, doubt-creased smile splits the Chairman's face. He's glad Mihalkov is here. he'd come to rely on him more and more in these disorienting days. Relaying orders to Papov, capturing the water creature and its bizzare amalgam mate, directing the facility's operations from the ground level; the spymaster had been a picturesque, perfect puppet.

"If I may, Chairman, you've forgotten that while Dmitri was meant to perform the experiments, he didn't create them himself. We have the entire team of men who did right here in this building, the same comrades who studied the creatures day and night looking for hypotheses to test. Dmitri is a loose end, yes, and the operation will be messier without him. But we have _everything_ we need in these four million square feet."

"I agree," Semichastny responds. "Drum up Shatalov, Anskevich, and Mosenkov. Brief them and have them begin their work within thirty-six hours. Find an agent here in the city or alert our offices in Volgograd; we need him detained and we need him detained _now_. And . . . be sure to thank Arkady when you speak with him next. I know he's very loyal. We'd never have known we'd been betrayed if not for him. Maybe I put in a good word for him with the Premier, get a new Order series made for him?"

Mihalkov smiles with a warmth not unlike that which had emanated from his hand, but there's something off in his face. A line is off, a wrinkle curved in different fashion than when Mihalkov had smiled before. Semichastny can't tell exactly what it means as he dryly, passionlessly laughs.

"I am sure he'll be elated to hear, Vladimir. But I cannot contact him right now, he's doing crucial work for me . . . in Volgograd."

She is quiet so quiet so quiet he thinks she has drowned but then he remembers the gills he grafted to her that she burns with fury at him because of and he is glad and sad at the same time. It'sbeen days and days anddays. Days, withnothing but the same bad cave he labored in for weeks to accompany him he feels his mind _slipp_ ing and sliding and transforming the way mud does under a powerfulrivercurrent but maybe its not transforming and maybe its just blowing away and scattering into a million insaneparticles. She's abandonedhim this time, and he has no one noone no one even when _S-T-R-I-C-K-L-A-N-D_ torturedhim he had her but now he can feelthetankshe 's in steam with her anger and her hurtheart she's lefthim left him lefthim. Walls burstin on him and his thoughts slurr and everything is too close too cold too dead dead dead and he's drowning he neverthought he could drown not in all his centuriesofbirth. Mencome and poke and prode openhis scales with all sorts of dead cold things that all bite deep and now he doesnteven stop them he welcomes them hopes they bring himdown. They force moresleepsap into him butnow hedoesnt fight it he can feel themrootingaroundwithinhim, hauling him out into the penwhere they can wound him probing his guts and burninglikefire but he heals just like always immortal agony eternally forhe will never _die_ and theyjot on their paperwritingthewords of shame stamped on his heart they're insidehim _inside_ his every veinjust like he knew they would be; theyre too deep in him, theirclaws toothickand sharp and hecan't root them out they bring him sick men andwounded men and menwithbloodyholeswhere their eyes went where were their _eyes_ theytell him to heal and he glowsbluebut nothing comes now. Everythingwithin clogs him and nothing can reach them they wheel the injured away and each one hetries to heal leaves something in him theyimprintonhim in him _he_ s partof _them_ now goingmad without the sun. without her withouther hesnothing and _S-T-R-I-C-K-L-A-N-D_ isall there is now

The minute she'd seen the rifle wielding Russian soldiers file into the room, Elisa'd darted below the surface of the water, as far down as her chain and the dimensions of the pen would allow. She guessed it was fifteen, twenty feet deep? Whatever it was, she'd felt no tug on her collar forcing her back to the lab proper, so they weren't there for her. Perhaps they needed the amphibian man for some demented experiment. Her heart's dull pace accelerates from zero to sixty and it pounds against her birdbone-thin ribs, ferocious protectiveness of her lover overriding any negative particles she'd give him. Slowly, her hands and dainty feet kicking once a second, she rises through the surprisingly clear green-tinged water. Her head breaches from the darkened depths, almost startling one of the guards into pointing the thick barrel of his gun at her. The wide magazine is hiding his hand from her eyes but she can tell they're battle-hardened and in complete control of the instrument of death they carry. Another man, taller and heavier than the soldier with a shaved head, strides over to him with flared nostrils. Babbling some bouncy series of insults in Russian, he slaps the barrel of the weapon down. After almost having her forehead caved in by a hail of bullets, Elisa is content with just peking her greyish-emerald eyes over the lip of the pen.

Or, as content as one can be watching the one they love suspended in a body of water with a deep incision right above his heart.

The two men move quickly, widening the cut and feeling around carefully within the creature's chest. Some of the apparatus has been disconnected from the ceiling and supports his left arm and leg, keeping the amphibian man from sinking into the pool. The other two of his limbs are gripped tight by the wrist and ankle by two laboratory assistants. In both these bonds the creature's body is secured, drugged into slumber and peeled open like layers of a biology class cadaver. Miraculously and against all vexings of nature, his divot-patterned chest still rises and falls with _breath_! He still lives! Elisa supposes she shouldn't be enormously surprised. If a thousand cattle-prod lashes and harpoons and bullets couldn't kill him, what on Earth would scalpels and surgical tools do? Even as the pair of scientists continue to stroke around the rubbery spaces in his chest, no doubt finding both duos of his lungs and his defiantly beating heart, he breathes. Life finds a way. Chattering excitedly in Russian the men pull back a slab of skin with layers of muscles and meat still attached in cleanly cut squares. One of them beckons an assistant over with a camera, and the thunderclap of white in the room signals he's just stamped the creature's insides into visual reality forever. The other jots down furiously on a pad of paper, stopping once every few seconds to take a wildly exalted look at whatever had been unveiled in the amphibian man's sternum.

 _Slop!_

The wedge of meat is slid back into place and all the cutting equipment taken to a nearby sink, washed, and disinfected. Before the men even return to their work, blue light has faded from the creature's gleaming, green skin and the wound they'd imparted on him moments before was gone. Swiftly they cuff both his free limbs and then he's _there_ , gold-black eyes that couldn't hide his intelligence, tiger-stripes the color of the ocean in far off Hawaii (or so Elisa had been told), only a few yards away from her. She could run - _swim-_ to him if she wanted, now. She could leap into his arms and her face would shine with tears and she'd sign to him how terrible she felt. She was so terrified and cold and hungry and she missed him and wanted him and-

Giles sits on his Egyptian couch, cats purring indignantly at their neglect. His canvas is empty, his shelves cleared of any and all art he could find. In his hand, a drained budweiser.

 _This_ is the future the amphibian man had forced upon her, and she in turn had forced onto Giles, she was sure of it. It was his fault. Her love for him and her love for Giles battle inside her, two angry and foaming doves tearing at one another. Giles had been with her since day one, unquestioning and unfathomable in his loyalty. He had given her things her way, content just to have a friend to spend his twilight years with who still knew who Ruth Etting was.

Where had having things her way that fateful day in T - 4 gotten her but kidnapped and tortured and under duress as deep as the ocean.

Her heart hardens again, and doesn't even crack when he opens his eyes, with the look of a dog, lonely and losing its mind in some dingy black-hole warehouse.


	7. Siniy Vyzov

He doesntreact when theywheeltheir pain sticks intothe room doesnt moveamuscle because hedlearned long before this thatthey were beyond himinpower they couldnt killhim but he coulddo nothing to them his claws might rend tear _kill_ one of them buthumanitywas a single entity a great angry apophisthat couldaffordtolose a hundred scales, nevermindtheone or two hisclawscould take. Theyworked around natures methods in wayshe couldnthavepredicted with a thousandmillion yearsof contemplation with theirbulletsand bandages and bigotry andbureaus whenhadthe world gottenso confusing hes dazed and sickand he knows hes not long forthis world buteveninhis rabid miasma he can smell somethng wrong inthe air something that chokedhis heart to smell more men fileinand they've gotguns and they all have thoseheavyskins on why it was so hot or maybe it was just his head that was hot it felt like swimming in lava but he inhalesagain andits like ice when he looks attheirfaces, theylook like _their_ hearts arechokedtoo like theyhave watched sickcreatures die in their nests orlikethey _put_ sickness there its a very human thing to have the evil one does haunt youand _haunt_ is the right word he thinksbecause theylook like specters hesawinthe stars they're white and wet and nervous and guilt looks like _wounds_ in their skin he sticksouthis tongue and he can tastetheirguilt like anacidburn and theyve _done something_ _what have they done_

Its always the same manwhofollows the soldiers first one baldandfat scientist and then a tallone and then another fatone and he hatesthemwith all the life he has leftbut allhishatemeans nothing becausehate cannotcrack him fromhisprison or he would be free. Itsgone anyway replaced byastonishmentand fear more fear fear fear he never knew he could be so afraid. here is someone newand soindelicateandhard this is the oldman who caughthim hauled him out of hishappiness andback intothe morass of humansandtheir dead world and the oldman's dead eyes likeice like a lakethatfroze from the bottomandkilledeverythingin it

His mouthismoving but thewaterdoesntobeyhim and he cant tellwhat the manis sayingbut ina few seconds hedoesn't needto theguns are allpointed atthewater and theguiltymen who the gods havenot yethung havetheir fingerson the trigger

 _But it isn't the water that he is in_

they arehaulingher from the pen where they'velashed her for weeks, her healed wounds fromtheir experiments weaving upherarms

 _CLARITY RETURNS_.

He shoots through the tank like a bullet, his mighty arms shattering the plexiglas pane that had kept him there. There's a titanic _woosh_ of water surging into the laboratory, knocking the armed men and the scientists down. Trays of metal blades and needles are thrown down, and equipment on the far walls is soaked in the backlash of water and sputters, smoking. His clawed feet touch solid ground for the first time in he doesn't know how long, and it is like scratching a year-old itch. In the moment before he snaps into his captors, he breathes, rumbling and powerful and timeless, as he always has been. Taking his agency back feels so incredible, so unbearable a relief he almost doesn't hear the shouts of the soldiers rising, trigger fingers twitchy.

Powerful calves and thighs carry him across the room in an instant, and he's on the first man just as fast; his claws rake the man's cheek as he rips the weapon from his grasp. A bullet flies out of it at the last second and pings in a bomb of fire on the far wall. Snarling, he lifts the same man from his cowering on the floor, bloody-faced, and tears his arm away. The scream that cuts from the soldier's throat makes the spines on his back stand up as if prompted by lightning and pure exaltation.

Another man, bigger than the first, points the slanted nose of his gun towards him and squeezes off a few rounds. Three _thuds_ hit him square in the breast, like a cleaver separating fish heads from their bodies, and blood arcs through the air in front of him as he slides backward. The hard, unreadable face of the man cracks a bit. There is hope underneath, hope that he will be saved from the gods' noose.

His webbed hand drops the severed arm of his opponent's comrade and a flash of blue light across his green flesh erases the wounds. His attacker's face, still dead and stoic erupts in a mask of horror and he screams. A leap carries him through the distance between them, and his weight smashes the soldier against the cold, soaked floor. His sputters of swallowed water turn to blood as avenging claws bury themselves in his stomach.

Something slams into him from behind and he turns to find a final soldier rushing him, roaring bloody murder and swinging a knife in his left hand.

One squeeze shatters every atom of bone in that hand, and almost hungrily his teeth lock around flesh and bone and trachea.

Three men lie dead, and he is free. The gold panes of his eyes sweep over the carnage. Water mingles with blood and concrete and gobbets of flesh. The scientists have vacated the room. Their boots left muddled imprints in the reddened liquid on the floor. Smoke and the iron barbs of blood fill the air. A triumphant, chittering roar soon joins them. It's over now. _The torture is over!_ He only need throw _E-L-I-S-A_ over his shoulder and exit this evil place, fling them both into the sea and then-

He'd forgotten one. It was never going to be this easy. _He'd forgotten one._

Her eyes are fearful, and he can tell that she is trying to call to him, begging him to do . . . _something_. But what could he do now? It was over, almost as soon as it had begun.

The old man, the one who'd caught them on the docks and brought them here, doesn't even bother pointing his snub-nosed gun at him. The man knows he'll just heal whatever wounds he can inflict and then tear him apart. It won't work. No, the aging man with the dead, glacial eyes sets the weapon against her temple. _E-L-I-S-A_ winces as the metal pushes hard against her skull and the man's vicegrip on her lithe arms flattens them against her back. He pulls her back until he touches the far wall. A modicum of realization can be seen inside the icy victory in the man's eyes. He knows he's won.

It wouldn't matter if the man shot him, but if he shot her? These would be no poorly placed wounds in her stomach. A head wound that egregious would be beyond even his miraculous powers to cure. He'd break after that, roar and scream in his tank every night, begging them to kill him. Endless centuries of his life, all worth nothing without _E-L-I-S-A_.

He moves very slowly, claws pointed towards the ground in submission and showing the human his palms. He can't bring his eyes to meet hers. He failed her again. The older man yells in his strange language for someone, and the ghost-faced doctors trudge guiltily into the lab yet again. The gun doesn't leave her temple as he addresses one of them, and the creature thinks he hears _S-H-A-T-A-L-O-V_. A name, or just another word in this world full of humans whose words meant nothing to him, no matter what the language?

The one called _S-H-A-T-A-L-O-V_ turns to the creature and looks at him with pitiful eyes.

"You . . . you will remain in the central pen . . ." he turns back to _E-L-I-S-A_ 's captor, asking a question. He rolls his eyes and answers back, as slow as if he were talking to a child.

"You will remain in the central pen or she will be shot. Both of you . . . do what we say or you will be shot."

The old man move slowly, dragging _E-L-I-S-A_ by the hair to the pen and tossing her into the water. Gun still pointed at her, he motions to the creature.

Defeated, and feeling his gills burn from exhaustion and water deprivation, he doesn't argue. The weight of his failure bruises his shoulders. The creature can't argue; all his energy is gone. His webbed feet dip into the pool and then he's in the freezing, dark water up to his collarbones. Crinkling as a collar locks around his throat, his gills fold back like the ears of a kicked puppy. "You understand me, woman?" A voice that sounds like _S-H-A-T-A-L-O-V_ says.

 _E-L-I-S-A_ has less energy than he does. She nods without opening her eyes or looking up.

Reality is slashed open by monsters in lab coats and spectacles, innards rended and twisted into terrible flesh towers, as the scientist speaks again :

"You and this creature will undergo intercourse, now. We will study, and determine if you are viably impregnated after a period of time. Do not resist."

His eyes flash open. Growls of outrage build in his throat, and he can feel his jaw clench and his shell-shattering teeth grind against each other. All the soldiers are dead, if he can just get in front of her so she can't be shot, he can kill them all, run wild through the facility and keep killing, kill all the way to the head of the snake until it's a world of just he and _E-L-I-S-A_ \- but then he sees her eyes. There's no more hate for him in them; no more outrage, no more anger, not even sadness at their imprisonment or love upon gazing at him. There doesn't appear to be much of anything there now, nothing but itching desperation. They speak to him even better than her hands could; they scream _no_.

_No no no no no_

This was it. If she'd surrendered, he had nothing left to fight for.

He checks out.

* * *

Elisa can't keep the tears and the terrified rasp from ripping its way from her throat when she feels him inside her for the first time in eternity. This should be making her happy. There's nothing. Why does it feel like she's alone, more alone than she was as a child?

His pace is slow, and against the storm of her inner turmoil she bites her lip. Ecstasy arcs through her, bolts of lightning contained in her veins with no direction to go but up. But its all black, all grey; black thunder rolling in grey veins, like the black ocean she's rolling in; buried in. She looks the creature in the eye. What felt like a thousand years ago, he'd told her it excited him, to look her right in her grey-green irises while he took her. Now it's like watching fruit go bad, to look into eyes that _don't see her_. Why doesn't he see her?

She feels her slit stretch tight against his long, engorged cock, heat from their bodies and the freezing cold of the water only adding to the mounting uncertainty and fear in her heart. Her spine arches in his slippery hands. All the while he thrusts away mindlessly, disconnecting his spirit from his body like he can't bear the pain. And they are watching. The scientists, the Russians who had born the instruments of her torment, who she was convinced had left their souls behind in the bloodied cobblestones of Berlin, were watching her and the creature perform this sacred act together. Why do they have to watch?! _Why do they watch when_ he _doesn't?!_

Her cheeks light with shame, and she closes her eyes, trying block out the sounds of bobbing water and the slap of skin against fins. Maybe if she lets herself drown in the black ocean she'll be safe; water will rush next to useless vocal cords and she'll black out, be free from the nightmare.

But she tries something different this time.

For the first time in too long, Elisa's imagination returns. Water floods in her heart, but it isn't repressive and black, isn't representative of her torment. It's clearer than clear. Like glass it shows off every rock and pebble and plant and creature behind its surface. Now all she sees below it is the smooth, porcelain bowl of her bathtub. The room unfolds in her head as a carpet of tile and diseased old wood. In front of the window blazing with sunset, he's there, like he used to be, shin-deep in bathwater. Elisa sees things in his eyes, more emotions and thoughts than the ages could hold. She goes to him, naked, ready to fall into ancient patterns.

Her head tips back in pleasure, and the scientists continue to observe.

Elisa banishes them from her daydream. They're summoned back to whatever conscienceless pit they crawled from. Now he's holding her in her dream, chittering softly into her ear as he nips at it. _She's missed this_. She's home, he's home, in her arms where he belongs. There are no green candies crunching or hammers clanking or sickles slicing. Just records and waves and the delicious way she feels the shape of him bulge from her stomach.

In her dream she roars, long and loud; growling _yes_ , _I have you again_ , and she feels fearsomeness explode behind her ribcage again, like it had when her creature had painted her red in her living room. _I am never letting go of you again and I will soak the world in blood to the core if it keeps you next to me._

Before she can stop herself, she realizes she's signing it, _to him_.

He stops thrusting, slowing down just enough to refocus. His eyes are deadly sharp, black and gold prongs, boring into her as surely as his cock does. Hands occupied pulling her hips to him, he can only ask with his eyes.

 _Me?_

 _Yes,_ she signs.

Then the dream becomes reality.

He pulls her up to him, so that their chests just barely touch. Back still arched, she angles her hips and throws her bottom out, smiling up at him through briny hair and tired eyes. Immediately, a huge, long-fingered hand she has come to know well smack upon her right cheek and stays there, firm-gripped. The creature's other hand trails across her gills, which flare elegantly in the air. He's still inside her, and she watches his eyes flutter with their horizontal lids as she starts to bounce against his cock.

He's in on her dream, that beacon of the past that had kept her from breaking these past few minutes. The wonder in his eyes as he looks at her convinces of it utterly. She doesn't see the false T - 4 laboratory reflected in him. He's there with her, standing in her bathroom a million light years away, groaning and rolling in the same primal undulations he's _so good at,_ he must have invented them when the world was young. They're one again; they have to be or that dark sea is going to kill them both. They're all they have. One dainty hand finds the back of his neck. Her palm brushes against the tips of his thrumming, electric gills as it settles like silt against his scales. The skin is hard, but pliable, as firm as he is inside her. She'd told Dmitri she had nothing left to lose, that her battle against the midnight sea was over and she'd been defeated.

They're at eye level with each other, each in the throes of lovemaking.

Elisa kisses him, slamming her mouth into his, soft lips meeting scarred ones, moaning as he pushes back, and realizes she has very much to lose indeed.

And that she won't let it go without a fight.

She feels orgasm contract her whole body like one massive muscle, and a few seconds later the warmness of his seed inside her. She thinks hazily on the words of the scientists who had been far from her mind for a while now. _Viably impregnated_ . They must have examined her and the creature. Could it be done? It excites her. Elisa knows that the thought should have drowned her in terror; why would she want to raise children, of any kind, in such an abrasive environment as this? _What would their captors do to them_?

But looking at him, at her creature, wrapping his expansive arms around her and cooing senselessly, fear is the last thing on her mind. All she's got is a sun of excitement in her head, as bright as the one that flows into her bathroom; the one that she can see even now, wrapping her and the amphibian man in promise. What if he _could_ impregnate her? The future burns its way into her, visions of an ocean dancing with their shimmering, pale-scaled offspring.

One day.

She doesn't register much of what happens next, but somehow the bodies are dragged away, and the creature imprisoned yet again. The tank he ripped his way out of is still in pieces all over the floor, and he's housed instead in the one on the opposite wall. Elisa still trembles at the warmth of his seed inside her, and as she watches him across the room, her eyes catch his.

 _What now? Forgiven?_ His hands ask.

 _You and me. Together._ Comes the reply. She smiles, blurry-eyed.

Blue light rings through the water on his side of the tank. Through the glass it distorts and whips whirling, wave-like patterns along the floor and every other surface in the lab. Elisa almost believes they're not trapped anymore, that they're under the ocean, watching the star and moonlight echo through hydrogen and oxygen around them.

They'll persevere, in unity and love.

If they don't, they'll die, in unity and love.

If they do, they'll find, waiting for them in the darkened rainforests . . . glory, glory, glory.


End file.
